Kristen Stewart Explains Why She Loves ‘Barbie,’ Mannequin Pussy, and Throwing Dice

If you want the perfect distillation of the Kristen Stewart aesthetic and ethos, look no further: “I like when things have space to fill. I don’t love perfected items,” she recently told Rolling Stone during the photoshoot for her new cover story. “I really like audience engagement. I love things that have internal lives — even photographs, like the one that we did today. There’s so much behind them.” (You hear that, Chris Ruffo?)

Those ideals inform so many of the books, movies, and musicians Stewart recommended to us. It ties to her most random interest these days: dice. “Really into dice,” she quipped. “I like throwing them. I like the heft, not knowing what’s gonna come out, placing bets, taking little signs from them.” 

As for movies, Stewart said her favorites are always the ones that “leave you wondering.” Last year offered plenty of those, with Stewart citing smash hits like Barbie (“I do backflips for that movie”), critical darlings like Anatomy of a Fall and The Zone of Interest, and cult favorites like Bottoms.

As for what’s on her bookshelf, Stewart said she’d been falling in love with a lot of contemporary female writers, seeing in their work an awakening of a collective unconscious that’s going, “Oh, excuse me, we need to contextualize this shame and this pain, because we don’t want to wear it constantly, but we do have to acknowledge and repossess it.”

She traced that notion to books like Emma Cline’s The Girls (a kind of retelling, fictionalized version of the Manson murders) and Kate Zambreno’s book Heroines, about the “mad wives of modernism,” and the way they were silenced by, and in support of, their famous husbands.

“The idea that we cultivate these men and pamper them and give them everything they need in order to be geniuses, and if we even suggest that we want to go down a rabbit hole, we’re pathologized and insane,” Stewart said. “And we’ve only just stopped doing that.”

Stewart got similarly philosophical when discussing her style, which she seemed staunchly disinterested in. “When I go to get dressed, nowadays, I literally just want to wear a uniform. I just want to be working. Unless we’re creating a character, unless we’re really unpacking affectation, everything is nonsense. Everything is bullshit unless you are naked. We’re all just lying to and manipulating each other all the time — and I mean that without any negative connotation. We just want to get through, to come across, and we have to try and do that every day…. I hate getting dressed, that’s why I wear the same thing every day.”

As for music, Stewart recommended Alice Coltrane and the Beatles “for anyone who’s in love.” And for those looking for a bit more bite, try Philly punks Mannequin Pussy: They’ve got a real sultry and positive growl that is just like shoving our faces in, like, the bush of being a woman — and I love them for that.”