“I’m playing like shit right now,” Kristen Stewart says, laughing as a ball rolls forlornly across her pool table and comes up short of the pocket. “But that’s good,” she adds, “because we’ve actually begun talking. And I can’t very well have you over here and then just beat the shit out of you, you know?”
House rules chez Stewart are that if you scratch, you can put the ball back on the table and give the other player two turns — a loophole we both take advantage of thanks to the distractions of a wide-ranging and provocative conversation for our March cover story. From mummies to minivans and Barbie to the royal family, here are some choice outtakes that didn’t make it into the article.
She’s into the sex scenes in Love Lies Bleeding.
“Men that I would talk to would be like, ‘Oh, it’s really gnarly,’” she says of one scene in particular (if you’ve seen the movie, you know which one). “And I’m like, ‘Really? I think it’s really hot and fun.’ Movies about female bodies are so rare. It is not something that we’re given a lot. And it’s not graphic either,” she adds, pointing out that, while the characters discuss sexual acts, very little is actually shown on screen. “It’s really only the dialogue [that] insinuates the physicality of it. You might see a side boob or something, but it’s almost like it’s more intense because it’s being talked about — because then it opens up the mental pictures. So much of what women experience sexually is without looking.”
She thinks the best directors are monstrous — in a good way.
“My favorite directors have such immense capacity and such a complete clear addiction to the path that they’re on that you can throw anything at them, and there’s no way to take them off the path,” Stewart says. “It’s like you need to be psychotic and monstrous, very narcissism-adjacent, to just go, ‘I’ll take the job of deciding fucking everything.’” But, she adds, it’s this obsession with one vision that frees her up to do her thing. “You need that person to have that. And as an actor, I am so willing to just cease to exist and live fully in service of whatever the fuck that is. Like, ‘My sporadic, spastic, impulsive, potentially treacherous ideas? I’m going to throw all of them at you, dude. Because I’m not thinking. That’s your job.’”
She’s curious if Prince William and Prince Harry have seen Spencer.
“I wonder about how they consume content regarding their lives,” Stewart says. “I would assume they’re all sitting there watching The Crown, but maybe not. Maybe they never touched it.” She’s thought about what would happen if she ever ran into Princess Diana’s children, and “if there would be any interaction or a response that wasn’t: ‘Oh, hey.’ It’s really tricky. The movie is such a poem — we were on their fucking side — but at the same time, of course, I think there’s no way for those people to not feel stolen from.”
She thinks Greta Gerwig is doing God’s work.
“It’s almost like the aperture of your pupil starts off normal — this is what we’re used to looking at — but by the end of the film, the circumference of your pupils are going to blow your fucking mind,” she says of the experience of watching Barbie. “We’re really letting all the light in. It’s like The Matrix.
“And honestly, fucking Greta Gerwig? I literally am in such complete awe of that person. She consistently made spectacular work that felt like her and clearly came from her — she is clearly the captain of those ships — but then she made this thing. It’s hard to make things that we haven’t seen before. I don’t know how she was allowed to do that, how she actually got it through. How did so many people sign off on this? She’s doing God’s work, dude. We don’t really know each other, but if I saw her, I would be happening at her. She’s a national treasure.”
She believes in ghosts — sort of, maybe.
She recently produced and narrated Hulu’s queer-ghost-hunter show Living for the Dead, but she says, “I definitely don’t believe in ghosts in the literal sense.” Then again, “I don’t not. I know that there are layers to this experience, and that is spiritual. When I’m by myself, I walk through this house like, ‘No! Not for me. For someone else. Not me, not me, not me. I’m just coming down to grab some water, and I’m going back upstairs without you.’ Like, I really verbalize it.”
She’s afraid of mummies.
“I was really into ancient Egypt when I was little, but mummies scare the shit out of me, dude,” she says. Truth be told, same with the pyramids: “I think I’m really kind of monolith-phobic. I’m so unnerved by the type of large structures that seem like, ‘How did this get here?’ The idea of walking into the Sphinx room by myself at night? I could start crying right now. It’s so fucking mysterious and weird.”
She collects fast cars but drives a minivan.
Though she keeps a warehouse in Van Nuys that’s full of hot rods, she drives around L.A. in a black minivan she calls “Beth.” “The douchiest thing about me, probably, is that I really do love cars. I’m very much from the Valley,” she says. She’s also very much into being very much from the Valley: “[Fiancee Dylan Meyer and I] both have these 7-Eleven tattoos. We’re dirtbags. We are L.A. dirtbags.”
Her controversial Rolling Stone cover was exactly what she had in mind.
“I want to make the pictures that I wanted to see when I was little, versus feeling like, ‘I hope they take a good picture of me.’ I know how to do the thing where you put your chin down and your eyes up and you open your mouth, but it’s like, ‘That’s not why you do a cover of fucking Rolling Stone.’ It’s an opportunity to design something, to tell a story. It’s a little art project.”
She has a cat named Cozy.
“And honestly, he is a main character,” she says. “He is a fucking star. I swear to God, if he was a person, he’d probably look like some fucking cock-of-the-walk actor boy. He’d be Paul Newman. You look at him and you’re like, ‘How the fuck do you get off?’ That’s how he makes you feel. But it’s a cat, so it’s OK.”
She is not a thrill seeker.
“Some people really like extreme physical experiences,” she says. “I’m such a fucking control freak. I would never do ayahuasca. I’m never going to jump out of a plane. Basically — long story, very short — I am a little bitch.”
She sometimes waits in the car at Trader Joe’s.
“Dylan gets so mad at me. She’s obsessed with Trader Joe’s. She’s like, ‘I want to look at the snacks, and you’re rushing me and you’re being weird.’ I’m like, ‘Yeah, man, I’m just going to stay in the car.’ It really depends on my mood. Sometimes I’m totally down to just be like, ‘Hey, what’s up?’ And I can easily just accept the weird energy and turn it into something positive, but then sometimes I transmute everything into the worst, and in those moments, I should not go outside.”
