Kristen Stewart is in Berlin this weekend for the international premiere of her lesbian crime-thriller Love Lies Bleeding.
Stewart plays a down-on-her luck gym manager, Lou, who falls for the muscular girl and competitive amateur bodybuilder, Jackie (Katy O’Brian) in the gym. However, Jackie works for Lou’s gun-smuggling and rifle range owner dad (Harris). When Lou’s sister (Jena Malone) gets beaten by her husband (Dave Franco), Jackie takes affairs into her own hands.
The actress, who presided over the Berlinale jury last year, told journalists at the press conference this morning that the opportunity to work with filmmaker Rose Glass was one of the main draws to the “ballistic” project for her.
“I definitely did this movie for Rose,” Stewart said. “Saint Maud is one of my favourite movies. We were friends immediately. She pitched it, and said A24 was willing to provide a lot of money for her second film, which is so fucking cool. The script was really interesting to read.”
The ultraviolent, twisty feature drew hoots and hollers at its Sundance premiere last month. The A24 film gets its international premiere tonight.
Stewart was asked whether the film had helped set a new standard in her mind for how queer stories are told, and how they don’t always need to be framed as coming-out stories.
Stewart acknowledged: “I think we can’t keep doing that…We’ve all been here the whole time. The era of queer films being so pointedly only that is done, they’re over.” The actress said she enjoyed exploring a range of characters and roles and not always “feeling like you have to stand on a f***ing soap box and be everyone’s spokesperson.”
The Twilight and Spencer star cited Now and Then and If These Walls Could Talk 2 as among her favourite queer-themed movies.
The actress was asked multiple times about a recent Rolling Stone cover story, whose front page was an image of the actress with her hands down a jockstrap. She said she had a “great time” doing the interview but would have liked the cover to have gone further in its depiction of queer sexuality.
“The writer of the story was great and shaped it well. But I like how the article was called ‘uncensored’ and then the whole cover was censored because the existence of a female body thrusting any sort of sexuality at you that’s not designed for or desired by exclusively cis straight males, people aren’t super comfy with that.”
She said Love Lies Bleeding foregrounds an alternative notion of strength and sexuality: “The people we don’t usually look at were front and center in this movie…We were toying with the idea of strength.”
She added: “Interviews we do as female artists are so proscriptively pushing this idea of empowerment because it makes everyone more comfortable about the fact we’ve been so oppressed. But it’s ok to take different pictures; to say that’s ok too. It’s crazy there aren’t more pictures like that. It’s not that big a deal.”
She joked that she “couldn’t wait to come to the press conference for all the follow-up questions” about the cover story.
In the interview, Stewart also took issue with Donald Trump for dragging her back in 2012 about the nature of her relationship with Robert Pattinson: “He’s such a little baby,” she told Rolling Stone, adding: “Fuck you, bitch!”
It was Trump’s stinging words, she said, that partly inspired her to first come out on SNL more than a decade ago.
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