The actor’s naturalistic style is captivating to some and inscrutable to others. As Princess Diana in “Spencer,” she takes on the biggest role of her career.
The airport in Telluride, Colorado, is small and private. The town’s film festival, held each year during the Labor Day weekend, has a reputation for intimacy—celebrities are not subjected to red carpets or corsetry, and the looming mountains have a way of making Hollywood seem garish and far away. This year, Kristen Stewart flew to Colorado from Venice, Italy, where “Spencer,” a new movie in which she plays Princess Diana, had just premièred. The first reviews of her performance (“ ‘Spencer’ Stuns Venice, Earning Standing Ovation and Oscar Buzz”—Variety) were published as she slept above the Atlantic. She stopped at a hotel to change and have her dyed blond hair styled in a messy updo, then went directly to the Werner Herzog Theatre, along with Pablo Larraín, the movie’s director, arriving only a few minutes behind schedule.
Her look was nineteen-fifties suburban dad: a black-and-white cabana shirt over a cropped white tank top, blue jeans, red suède creepers, white socks. Stewart, who was born and raised in Los Angeles, describes herself as California to the core—she has “L.A.” tattooed on a wrist—and few people since James Dean have looked better or more at ease in a T-shirt and jeans. She seems to channel a lineage of countercultural American femininity: rockabilly girls and punkettes, Beat poets and skaters, Jordan Baker rather than Daisy Buchanan. She was convincing as Joan Jett, in the 2010 bio-pic “The Runaways,” and as Marylou, the sixteen-year-old bride of Dean Moriarty, in the 2012 adaptation of “On the Road.” Now she was playing a different misfit, the twentieth century’s most famous princess. She told the audience that Telluride was the best festival, and that she’d never had more fun making a movie. Then everyone settled in to watch a film about confinement and despair set to a frequently menacing score of free jazz.
“Spencer” takes place during the Royal Family’s Christmas holidays at Sandringham House in 1991, at a breaking point in Diana’s marriage to the Prince of Wales. Surrounded by quivering Christmas jellies and glistening puddings, the Princess is cut off from the world and oppressed by royal traditions; eventually, she is haunted by the ghost of Anne Boleyn. The score, by Jonny Greenwood, raises the tension to nearly unbearable levels. Early in the movie, Diana sits at dinner in the throes of an anxiety attack, dressed in a green gown the same color as the soup in front of her, and crunches into a string of pearls. (The gems are a source of humiliation: Charles has bought the same present for his wife and for his mistress.) The necklace reappears later, fully intact, making it clear that Diana is mentally unravelling. “The piano wire snaps way quicker than I thought,” Stewart said, when I asked her about the scene. “Spencer” has less in common with “The Crown,” the Netflix series about the Royal Family, than it does with “Rosemary’s Baby” or “Gaslight,” films in which the mental breakdown of the female lead is the rational response to conspiracy, and madness looks something like resistance.
Thirteen years ago, at the age of eighteen, Stewart became internationally famous as the star of “Twilight,” the adaptation of a young-adult novel about vampires and werewolves in the Pacific Northwest. The film and its sequels gave Stewart a legion of fans but, in other quarters, fixed an impression of her as the oddly inexpressive star of mawkish teen movies. Online, a host of memes appeared featuring images of Stewart with captions such as “Five movies, one facial expression,” or “I don’t always smile, but when I do, I don’t.” The jokes captured something about Stewart’s naturalism and restraint, qualities of her acting that some find captivating and others inscrutable.
“There are certain actors and actresses that can become, in my eyes, transparent,” Pablo Larraín told me, sitting on a bench in a park in Telluride between screenings. He meant the adjective pejoratively. He went on, “You can see sometimes a movie that is too transparent, so I don’t understand what I’m doing as an audience,” because the filmmakers are “giving it to me completely digested.” Larraín, who grew up in Santiago, Chile, is thoughtful and bearded. He made his first English-language film, “Jackie”—as in Kennedy Onassis—in 2016. That same year, Stewart starred in “Personal Shopper,” an eerie art-house film about an American in Paris trying to connect with the spirit of her dead brother. In Stewart’s depiction of the isolation of grief, Larraín saw the qualities that he wanted in his Diana. Both of Larraín’s parents have served in the Chilean government; his mother, a descendant of one of the country’s wealthiest families, was always interested in Diana, he has said. “There’s something that needed to be magnetic and, at the same time, very mysterious,” he told me of the role as he envisioned it. The veteran British screenwriter Steven Knight wrote a script for him, and he sent it to Stewart. Then he called her up, and, “with her perfect American accent,” she said, “Dude, I’ll do it.”
“Spencer” makes use of Stewart’s mystery and magnetism but also pushes her into styles of performance that her previous roles have not. She does an accent, of course, and plausibly mimics Diana’s familiar mannerisms; she also imbues the character with a melodramatic hyperbole that takes her beyond historical depiction and, at times, into comedy. Her Diana tries to shape-shift her way out of powerlessness—eyes downcast and voice breathy in moments of pliancy, chin raised with imperiousness when breaking rules, her moods oscillating unpredictably as she strides through the castle halls at a rapid clip, like a woman pursued.
The day after the screening, Stewart went paragliding off a cliff, then attended a press reception for the film at an Italian restaurant on Telluride’s main drag. She was accompanied by a few friends and her fiancée, the screenwriter Dylan Meyer, whom she began dating in 2019, and who proposed to her this past summer. Stewart has publicly dated women for most of her adult life, shrugging off the heteronormativity of traditional Hollywood stardom with a nonchalance that seems partly temperamental and partly generational. She mostly shies away from social media, though she occasionally makes cameos on Meyer’s Instagram. Her friends, practiced in the art of standing on the sidelines, made their way to the bar as she shifted into professional mode, ready to be led around the room by a publicist.
I joined her, and watched as two ecstatic organizers of a film festival in Indianapolis volleyed effusive compliments her way. Stewart cracked jokes and stretched her quadriceps. Her California locution, full of f-bombs and “dudes,” seems to put people at ease. “I wish I was able to go to some of the more micro festivals,” she said, before adding, “Not that your festival is micro!” She grabbed her foot and mimed putting it into her mouth. They shooed her away, charmed. I stayed for another drink with one of the pair from Indiana, who confided to me over a Cosmo that, as much as he liked “Spencer,” he loved “Twilight.”
Afew weeks later, I made plans to meet Stewart in Los Angeles. She wanted to golf. Her dad taught her how when she was a child, and she had recently resumed the habit. She suggested that we meet at a city course in Griffith Park. The dry September air hung hazy above brown hills, hummingbirds sipped at flowers, and elderly men shuffled around the green.
If you Google Stewart’s name on any given day, you are likely to find, on several Web sites, detailed descriptions of what she wore while getting an iced coffee or picking up groceries. She arrived at the course, without any apparent paparazzi in pursuit, wearing jeans and a T-shirt, pink-tinted sunglasses, and Adidas. “I haven’t really figured out my golf look,” she admitted. She walked behind the clubhouse to do reconnaissance. “I like to gopher it out first,” she said, squinting up at the driving range, where a crowd of mostly male golfers dressed in khaki pants practiced their drives. Someone was occupying her preferred spot, a shady corner on an upper level with a bench. “Maybe he’ll leave,” she said. We walked back to her black minivan—its name is Beth, she told me—and she retrieved her golf bag. After filling a basket with balls from a vending machine, she unpacked her gear and put on a white leather glove, keeping an eye on her spot. Then she turned to me. “So,” she said, “what do you want to talk about?”
