Can you believe that there are people out there who still hate Kristen Stewart? Award-winning actress, queer icon, queen of big fits Kristen Stewart? While promoting the new, re-rebooted Charlie’s Angels, she made a stop at Hot Ones, the interview show on which celebrities torture themselves by eating increasingly spicy chicken wings. During her interview, she skillfully moves up the Scoville scale and throws playful insults at host Sean Evans when hell is unleashed on her taste buds. A scroll through the comments section (a bad habit that I can’t shake) pulls up many viewers who are surprised that, *gasp*, she’s a cool person. Some even make the scandalous claim that maybe they like her now.
It’s the manifestation of a mindset stuck in 2008. Years after she last played a moody teen in love with a moodier vampire, naysayers still circulate the same old, tired jokes about Stewart’s supposed inability to act, smile, and/or emote. When French director Olivier Assayas called her “the best actress of her generation,” his comment was immediately treated like some cruel joke—but he’s right.
Hear that sound? That’s me putting my foot down. Kristen Stewart deserves our RESPECT.
It’s easy to compare Stewart to her Twilight co-star, Robert Pattinson, since both have embarked on similar trajectories since the franchise ended. Instead of bolstering their star power by continuing to appear in blockbusters, they leveraged their positions in order to pick and choose the roles they want. That move has led them to collaborate with auteur directors—she with Assayas (Clouds of Sils Maria, Personal Shopper) and Kelly Reichardt (Certain Women), he with everyone from Claire Denis (High Life) to David Cronenberg (Cosmopolis, Maps to the Stars). Their films don’t even come close to generating the astronomical box-office numbers of those that launched their careers, but they have built their credibility as indie icons.
The arrival of Charlie’s Angels marked Stewart’s return to the mainstream—and, after its subsequent box-office thud, the re-emergence of an exhausting discourse around her capabilities as a performer. When Pattinson was unveiled as the new Batman, any online debate quickly subsided when his critics remembered that (shocker) he’s actually a really good actor. He’s been able to shake off his reputation because his work speaks for itself. The same can’t be said for Stewart, even though her performances are of equally high caliber. She’s still underestimated, or outright rejected, like she’s been branded with the Scarlet Franchise.
Stewart has acted in 14 films since she retired Bella Swan, but no matter how extraordinary her performance (as is the case every time), she’s stuck with a stigma she can’t get rid of. Never mind that she won the French equivalent of an Oscar (and is the only American actress ever to do so), or that she held her own in a David Fincher movie alongside Jodie Foster when she was 10 years old—she was a little too emo in Twilight, which I guess is an unforgivable sin. Edward wasn’t exactly a ray of sunshine either, guys!
Stewart may not have been that well-suited to her breakthrough role, but only because the heightened melodrama of bloodthirsty young love is incongruous to the actress’s measured stillness. Stewart was never a bad actress (I would argue that Twilight isn’t even that bad either); it just took her a long time to find the projects that aligned with her distinctive mode of acting. She exercises careful restraint and refuses to succumb to artificiality; she makes acting look easy because it doesn’t look like she’s acting. To put it simply: She feels real—and that puts her at odds with the constructed world of cinema. Pattinson loves to let loose and indulge in excess—take, for instance, his madcap lighthouse keeper in The Lighthouse or his frantic bank robber in Good Time. But Stewart ventures toward the other extreme: quiet, closed-off, reserved. She’s mysterious and unknowable, and that’s what makes her such an alluring screen presence.
It’s not the first time that an actress has been villainized for no apparent or valid reason. The world turned on Anne Hathaway for “trying too hard,” while turning on Kristen Stewart for not trying hard enough. "I think people are used to seeing actors be wide open and desperately giving of themselves, and while I do that on a movie set as much as I can, it's so unnatural for me to do it on television, in interviews, in anything like that," Stewart told Charlize Theron in a 2012 interview. After years of harassment and intrusion into her private life, it’s only fair that she would be uncomfortable with sharing herself. But for any woman, it’s seemingly impossible to navigate a life in the public eye without being sentenced to Internet jail forever.
With Stewart re-entering the blockbuster fold, perhaps the world will finally catch on to the truth: that she really is one of the best actresses working today. The film flopping at the box office suggests otherwise—she’ll probably go back to doing the indie thing anyway—but Charlie’s Angels stands as Stewart’s act of defiance against her critics. I’m just saying, it doesn’t seem accidental that when the allegedly “emotionless robot” Kristen Stewart first appears onscreen, she has a smile on her face.
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