The movies Kristen Stewart wants nothing to do with: “Sounds like a fucking nightmare”
Kristen Stewart has had a weird career, for despite still being so young, she’s been working for decades now, ticking off just about every type of role and every type of movie of every level of budget you can imagine.
However, still, when you think of her name, only one thing instantly springs to mind: Twilight. In spite of already having countless projects under her belt by then, including a co-star with Jodie Foster in the harrowing Panic Room, it feels as though Stewart was doomed the second she signed up for the vampire franchise.
Perhaps doomed is too strong a word, as there’s no denying that her career has been powerful since playing one of the most iconic roles in the minds of Gen Zs and millennials everywhere. It’s not even just that it’s been powerful in a status way, but since the end of the franchise, Stewart has put in some truly incredible performances in some real, serious movies.
In Personal Shopper, her ability to mix a poignant portrayal of grief with more classic horror tropes is remarkable, after which we saw her step confidently into the fucked up world of David Cronenberg in Crimes of the Future, and then, recently, into Love Lies Bleeding, which felt like a true tour de force performance that merged everything she’d learnt before through comedies, dramas, romances and action movies.
All of that is to say that Stewart is a great and talented actor, but she knows exactly what it means to be completely dogged by one contract. “Say I do a big franchise movie about a vampire that falls in love with a normal girl. It’s like, ‘Now do you want to show them that you can be a real, serious actor?’ It’s like, ‘Was I not being a real, serious actor?’” Stewart once said to Patti Smith in a conversation for Interview magazine, revealing how she felt boxed in and underestimated.
Despite playing in one of the most beloved and successful franchises of his century, the actor felt, to some degree, that it had damaged her prospects, and that’s exactly why she will never do a Marvel movie.
“I will likely never do a Marvel movie,” she said on the Not Skinny but Not Fat podcast, adding plainly, “it sounds like a fucking nightmare, actually”.
In a lot of ways, Twilight and Marvel are the same: they’re big-budget, huge movies that draw masses upon masses of fans, that also seem to curse the performer to only ever be remembered or recognised for those roles. Over time, the pattern has emerged that when an actor is drawn into the Marvel cinematic universe, they rarely get out with quite the same level of respect or reverence, so for someone like Stewart, who has experienced that once and is still working to recover from it, it’s not something she’s going to sign up for again.
But at the same time, she isn’t stupid, and so her approach to gaining respect isn’t to disappear, as she’s happy to admit that she loves being part of “big movies because I like people to watch them when I’m in them”. She wants to be seen, and she wants to get paid, but she simply wants to be careful what new character might attach itself to her forever as she’s still shaking a blood-sucking one off.
