How Kristen Stewart went from Twilight’s ‘most hated actor’ to indie provocateur

The former ‘Twilight’ star has carved out a formidable career in the indie world. Her new queer romance-thriller ‘Love Lies Bleeding’ may be her most fearless project yet, writes Geoffrey Macnab

Kristen Stewart at Berlinale to promote her new movie ‘Love Lies Bleeding’ (Getty)

Early on in Love Lies Bleeding, Kristen Stewart attempts to unblock a toilet. It’s a truly filthy spectacle as she sticks her hand down the bowl – shades of Trainspotting’s “worst toilet in Scotland”. As recently as 2021, Stewart was playing royalty, as a harrowed Princess Diana in Spencer. But Love Lies Bleeding makes it clear: she’s still not afraid of getting her hands dirty.

Directed by Rose Glass, the new film is an outrageous lesbian noir thriller set in the 1980s. Ex-Twilight star Stewart plays Lou, the unkempt, chain-smoking manager of a New Mexico gym. In the film, Lou soon falls for Jackie (Katy O’Brian), a young homeless woman and bodybuilder. They become lovers and partners in mischief but they’re up against two thoroughly repulsive men: Lou’s psychotic, insect-obsessed father (a lank-haired Ed Harris), who owns the local gun range, and her sleazy wife-beating brother-in-law (Dave Franco). It may be the boldest performance of Stewart’s career so far, and the film itself is invigorating, darkly funny and full of sex and violence.

But then again, Stewart has come a long way from the woman once referred to as the “world’s most hated actor”. The moniker was spread around after her early stilted turn as Bella Swan in the Twilight franchise, when some teen fans turned against her because of her relationship with co-star Robert Pattinson. She was criticised for seeming “sullen” and “ungrateful” on the red carpet, and was only further attacked for pivoting to obscure and supposedly pretentious independent and arthouse movies (Welcome to the Rileys; Personal Shopper). As the years went by, though, it became clear that she was the real deal.

When Stewart came bounding on the stage of the Verti Music Hall after Love Lies Bleeding’s premiere in Berlin on Sunday evening, the audience seemed entranced by her playful rebelliousness. “I had a feeling in the room with this person,” Stewart enthused, explaining why she was so keen to work with Glass, a young British director whose only previous feature was 2019’s dingy low-budget horror Saint Maud. She had loved Saint Maud and recognised Glass as a kindred spirit who shared her own anarchic instincts.

After spending much of her Hollywood career playing “aspirational people I don’t actually believe in”, Stewart was also clearly delighted to be taking on a character as grungy and outspoken as Lou – in a movie that was originally going to be called “Macho Sluts”.

“To me, it just seemed very obvious that Kristin would be amazing as an updated version of a brooding film noir anti-hero who is haunted by her past,” Glass said.

There’s a sense of reckless abandon about Stewart in Love Lies Bleeding that typifies her approach to screen acting in recent years. In the film, Stewart doesn’t baulk at anything – whether it’s explicit sex or the moments she’s required to clean up after violent murders. We see her patiently wiping the blood off picture frames and swabbing away the bits of brain and flesh that have become stuck to the ceiling.

Bleeding hearts: Stewart and Katy O’Brian in ‘Love Lies Bleeding’ (Anna Kooris)

It’s not all blood and viscera, however: Stewart shows a nice sense of comic timing too. She knows how to deadpan, for instance with her scene-stealing pet cat or when she is trying to brush off her clingy ex-girlfriend and co-worker Daisy (Anna Baryshnikov).

The marketing for the film has been just as daring. Stewart is pictured in a provocative pose in the current edition of Rolling Stone, staring defiantly out at the camera with her hand stuck down the crotch of her jockstrap. The image has caused outrage in the US among more prudish types; Rolling Stone itself has crowed that right-wingers are “terrified” of the Stewart cover story.

Explaining the thinking behind the pose, Stewart cheerily remarked: "Now, I want to do the gayest f***ing thing you’ve ever seen in your life. If I could grow a little moustache, if I could grow a f***ing happy trail and unbutton my pants, I would.

“The existence of the female body expressing any kind of sexuality that’s not designed for or desired by exclusively cis-straight males is not something people are super comfy with, so I’m really happy with it,” the queer actor later said, defending the photo shoot.

Vampire weekdays: Robert Pattinson and Stewart in ‘Twilight’ (Summit Entertainment)

Not since Jane Fonda in her “Hanoi Jane” phase has a major Hollywood actor taken such a subversive approach to the business of promoting her own movies. Stewart, who is soon to be seen as feminist author and philosopher Susan Sontag in a new biopic, is using her public prominence to advocate for “a new era of queer films”.

Often, when mainstream figures begin to question the Hollywood machine, they very quickly feel the consequences. Careers flounder. In tragic cases, they can end up like Jean Seberg (whom Stewart portrayed in the 2019 movie Seberg), dying as marginalised and near-forgotten figures. When Fonda was campaigning against the Vietnam war in the early 1970s, she was accused of treachery and became an object of indignant rage in the US.

Stewart too knows how to weather a backlash. And, crucially, she’s never really lost her popular appeal: when she chooses to make offbeat independent films, it immediately becomes easier for those films to be financed. That’s why the most adventurous companies want to work with her. (Love Lies Bleeding was made through the UK’s Film4 and A24, whose other recent credits include Oscar contender The Zone of Interest and Zac Efron wrestling movie, The Iron Claw). “Rose was allowed to make a big, huge movie. Come on! It’s so cool!” Stewart (speaking in Berlin) said. She was delighted at her part in helping the young British director get such an unlikely project off the ground.

The audience at the premiere last weekend clearly adored Stewart. So did the festival organisers. Last year, she was Head of the Festival jury – and was instrumental in giving Berlinale’s most important honour, The Golden Bear, to On the Adamant, a low-budget French documentary about a mental health facility.

Stewart as Princess Diana in ‘Spencer’ (STXfilms)

The star’s speech as she presented its director Nicolas Philibert with a prize he never expected to win was vintage Stewart – a rambling monologue about how art is defined. who is allowed to “do it” and why it matters so much to push boundaries. She cited everybody from Aristotle and Roland Barthes to the puerile children’s cartoon Beavis and Butt-Head. At the end of it all, she suddenly concluded than when something’s good, “you just know it when you see it”. It’s a remark that applies to her as much as anyone.

In its profile, Rolling Stone picked up on a paradox about Stewart: she’s the “go-to choice for countercultural roles” but she also has the “ability to make characters seem countercultural by virtue of the fact that she is playing them”.

To this I would add another paradox: the harder Stewart tries to be an outsider, the more popular she seems to become. Whether she is a gore-drenched gym manager or a royal princess, she somehow always ends up with the audience back on her side.

‘Love Lies Bleeding’ is released in the UK on 19 April