Kristen Stewart Loves the ‘Gothic, Gay Inclination’ of ‘Twilight
2024 marks 12 years since the conclusion of The Twilight Saga, the successful film franchise based on the book series by Stephanie Meyers. Kristen Stewart was the star of all five Twilight movies and now that enough time has passed, she can see them for what they really are: extremely gay.
“I can only see it now. I don’t think it necessarily started off that way, but I also think that the fact that I was there at all, it was percolating. It’s such a gay movie,” Stewart told Variety in a recent interview. “I mean, Jesus Christ, Taylor [Lautner] and Rob and me, and it’s so hidden and not OK. I mean, a Mormon woman wrote this book. It’s all about oppression, about wanting what’s going to destroy you. That’s a very Gothic, gay inclination that I love.”
Bella Swan, the lead character played by Stewart, was admittedly, and painfully, invested in men — or more specifically, in Robert Pattinson’s Edward Cullen. There was also Taylor Lautner’s Jacob Black (and that one questionably tense scene between Bella and Carlisle Cullen, Edward’s adoptive vampire father, in New Moon, but we don’t have time to unpack that here), but Bella wasn’t willing to quite literally die for him in the way that she was for Edward.
Still, from the peak of the franchise’s success and in the years after its conclusion, some viewers have revisited the Twilight films and dissected them through the lens of queer theory. In 2022, actress Ashley Greene, who played Alice Cullen in all five films, told Insider: “I guess one thing that has changed is a lot of people have said that Alice was their gay awakening. She explained that, similarly to Stewart, she “didn’t get that when the films first came out,” but “can fully recognize how and why now.”
Stewart herself came out in 2017 during a hosting gig on Saturday Night Live. “Donald [Trump], if you didn’t like me then,” she said at the time, referring to Trump’s obsessive tweeting about her former relationship with Pattinson, “you’re really probably not going to like me now, because I’m hosting ‘SNL’ — and I’m, like, so gay, dude.”
“It was cool to frame it in a funny context because it could say everything without having to sit down and do an interview,” Stewart told Variety. “‘So what platform is that going to be on? And who’s going to make money on that? And who’s going to be the person that broke it?’ I broke it, alone.”