Washington — Washington - "She's not what you expect as the lead in Twilight," says Kristen Stewart, of, really, herself, playing Bella Swan, the high school girl who falls in love with a vampire, Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson), in the movie adaptation of Stephenie Meyer's best-selling novel (opening Friday nationwide). "She's not your typical damsel in distress. She really is a woman."
Sitting in an interview suite at the downtown Ritz-Carlton in Washington, this slender, intense actress, 18 and a mere slip of a thing, comes off as girl and woman. She wears jeans and a T-shirt that bears the logo "Defend New Orleans." (The day before she had wrapped shooting Welcome to the Rileys in the Big Easy with James Gandolfini and Melissa Leo.) She shares indecipherable in-jokes with her friend and co-star Nikki Reed, who plays the female vampire Rosalie and six years ago wrote Thirteen with Twilight director Catherine Hardwicke. (Reed wears jeans and a Diet Coke T-shirt.) They frequently swap glances full of private meaning. They even at times giggle.
FOR THE RECORD
A profile of Kristen Stewart in Sunday's Your Arts and Entertainment gave the incorrect director and title of a 2007 movie. The director was Jon Kasdan and the movie was In the Land of Women.
The Baltimore Sun regrets the errors.
But then Stewart will pick up her train of thought without missing a stop: "Bella has very innate female qualities, ones I am extremely proud of, and in such extreme situations they are amplified and really brought to the surface. She trusts herself and trusts her feelings even if it's the wrong thing to do pragmatically. She's a very logical girl; she's not prone to fantasy."
Stewart adopts a comical distressed-damsel flutter as she argues that Bella is not just a girl "losing herself in an extravagant situation." And then, as if by reflex, her gaze darkens and her voice deepens when she concludes, "She follows her instincts and gut feelings and she's so much stronger than Edward, her amazing vampire ideological counterpart. He's small and weak and scared. She wears the pants in the relationship."
Did co-star Pattinson resist this interpretation? "Not at all," Stewart says, as Reed laughs.
Stewart's face has just appeared on the cover of Entertainment Weekly, and the studio behind Twilight, Summit Entertainment, is putting her in front of us as an acclaimed supporting actor on the brink of becoming a brilliant new star. But Stewart is intent on continuing to conduct her career the way she always has, working on intriguing projects with top, seasoned talents such as Barry Levinson (What Just Happened) and Sean Penn (Into the Wild) and gifted newcomers like Jake Kasdan (In the Company of Women). She took Twilight for the right reasons.
