Kristen Stewart is opening up about feeling like she “crashed and burned” her way through filming the Twilight saga in her late teens and early twenties.
During an appearance on the SmartLess podcast hosted by Jason Bateman, Will Arnett and Sean Hayes that was released on Monday, Stewart reflected on the grueling four years she spent making the Stephanie Meyer vampire movie franchise. Stewart was 17 when she started playing main protagonist Bella Swan, a high school girl who moves to the small town of Forks, Washington and falls hard for a vampire named Edward Cullen, played by Robert Pattinson.
Kristen Stewart Looks Back on Filming the Twilight Saga
Asked by Bateman about whether she ever considered going to college, Stewart replied: “I have to say I felt like at the time that I could have redirected energy and become an academic, I was so hungry for more work because the Twilight series itself took forever. We did it over a four-year period. We made five movies. It’s probably more than four years, by the way — 17, 18, 19, 20, 21.”
“I wanted to make other movies at the same time so badly. I just crashed and burned and barreled my way through those years and just was really… lacked any balance. I was just working constantly,” Stewart added.
She says she and other Twilight cast members were desperate to film other movies in between the five Twilight films — Twilight (2008), The Twilight Saga: New Moon (2009), The Twilight Saga: Eclipse (2010), The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1 (2011) and The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 2 (2012).
“We all, if we were able to, tried to slam one in between. That was why it was such a loaded period, because we were either promoting one of these movies, making one of these movies, or trying to shove in something that gave you some variation. Not in terms of what it was for other people, but just so you could do something other than play that one part for f—ing six years,” she said.
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In between the first and last Twilight films, Stewart also starred in Adventureland (2009), Welcome to the Rileys (2010), and played Joan Jett in the biographical music drama The Runaways (2010).
She also discussed the difficulties of going through her adolescence in the public eye.
“And also, 17 is the most awkward age ever. You’re just now starting to be like, ‘Oh, I am a woman.’ I think I always was super utilitarian about the job because my parents are crew, and I was just like, Yeah, I love this job. It’s what I’m going to do forever. I’m going to make movies forever. It’s chill. Then that definitely made things different,” she said.
“When people ask me about my high school years or my college years, which I didn’t do either of because I’m an idiot. That’s the period of time that I think about,” she added of Twilight. “It’s so weird because it doesn’t feel like I’m referencing myself. I feel like… talking about a different time, it’s hard for me to relate to that. It’s so personal. I don’t see it from the outside. I’m like, ‘Well, I was going through… It’s just so f—ing weird to do everything personal publicly. I was like, ‘Oh, you know [who] I was dating. You know exactly what happened.'”
She still laments being asked about her first public relationship with Twilight co-star Pattinson over ten years after they broke up in 2013.
“Are you guys asked about your first partners every time you do an interview?” Stewart asked. “Obviously, the series comes up, it’s where I come from. It’s like, ‘Oh, well, what about that?’ You’re like, It’s crazy that people are still asking me about that first dude.'”
But when Bateman, Hayes and Arnett asked her to elaborate on which specific dude she was talking about she demurred: “Well, it’s the proverbial dude.”
Stewart can most recently be seen in Love Lies Bleeding, a romantic thriller directed by Rose Glass that arrived in theaters last month. She plays Lou, a reclusive gym manager who falls for a body builder named Jackie, pulling her into the violent crime web of her family.
She’s also in the process of financing her directorial debut, The Chronology of Water based on the book by Lidia Yuknavitch.
You can listen to the full SmartLess interview here.
Main Image: Kristen Stewart as Bella Swan in Twilight (2008), Summit Entertainment
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