Playing It Cool

Kristen Stewart Is Famous For Seeming Reluctant About Her Fame. But The Charlie’s angels Actor Is Learning To Embrace The Finer Points of Megastardom

- Durga Chew-Bose

Kristen Stewart plunks down on a bench, on the west side of the basin of the reservoir in Silver Lake. She gets comfortable, pushing her hair away from her face. A thicket of short crunchy blonde that matches her eyebrows, also blonde. Both are growing out. They are the color of dead grass, still holding the memory of its green.

A shorn blonde comes to mind, one whom Stewart will soon portray: Jean Seberg in director Benedict Andrews’s political thriller, Against All Enemies. It chronicles the late actress’s fatal demise brought on by the FBI’s surveillance program COINTELPRO, which targeted and tried to discredit Seberg because of her relationship with Hakim Jamal and the Black Panther Party. “Even though she went through circumstantially, really horrific, tragic things, there was something about [Seberg] that was energetically undeniable,” says Stewart. “She was so misunderstood. It’s not like you need to hero-worship a celebrity, they are just people you want to look at. The fact that people stared at her and fixated on things that were not real, projections: That really ultimately destroyed her.”

Stewart moves like a writer’s actor, speaking in gestural Morse. She signals with her forehead or a messy flip of her hair, conveys apprehension through the stiffenergy stored in her shoulders or the round attitude of her chin. Her green eyes are searching—their undertow puffy—her sonic delivery is low-key and annotative.