14 DAY TRIAL // Kristen Stewart had trouble adjusting to her “Twilight” fame, so all the ill-will she had incurred until the Rupert Sanders scandal in 2012 blew back on her when she got caught making out with a married man (Sanders), behind the back of her then-boyfriend Robert Pattison.
She had had negative media attention until that moment, but nothing could have prepared her for what was coming. Op-eds were penned, mean jokes were made, fans were outraged and became vocal about it in the blogosphere, and Stewart came dangerously close to losing everything she had worked for.
She likes to think of that now in terms of her troubled 20s.
Kristen Stewart gets candid with Marie Claire
This August, Kristen returns in theaters with the stoner comedy “American Ultra,” also starring Jesse Eisenberg. She’s promoting it with an interview with Marie Claire, in which she also talks in vague terms about the scandal that nearly cost her her career.
“I lit my universe on fire and I watched it burn,” she says. “Speaking very candidly, it was a really traumatic period in my early 20s that kick-started something in me that was a bit more… feral.”
This traumatic period, she says, came after being constantly told that she did not fit in the boxes the industry had prepared for her: she wasn’t nice enough, she wasn’t “uncomplicated” or accessible enough, she had all these things she needed to change before she could be the girl everyone else wanted her to be.
The Kristen of today is braver, less attentive to what the world tells her she should be like and certainly with tougher skin. The Kristen of then would always apologize whenever she wasn’t what others thought she would be; today’s Kristen simply shrugs and, with a simple F-word, moves on. She doesn’t care anymore.
Kristen is carving her own trajectory in showbiz
She does have a point: even without the cheating scandal, Kristen would have still been put through hell in the media because she wasn’t what the industry had come to expect a female movie star to be.
She was often criticized for not knowing how to behave during interviews, for not knowing how to speak, for refusing to wear high heels on the red carpet, for refusing to dress “like a celebrity” on her days off, you name it.
Even without the scandal, a crisis would have still come.
Luckily, she managed to come out of it an even more determined fighter. Once “Twilight” was done, Kristen focused mostly on indie films, which allowed her to keep a lower profile in the media.
She won over critics with her performance and then, slowly, she started coming back into the spotlight, making sure the media outlets she spoke to allowed her to have her own voice.
Kristen Stewart may have been viciously mocked for her wooden, lip-biting performance in “The Twilight Saga” (and with just cause), but she is emerging as a strong voice of the younger generation. Even if she ends up failing, at least she’s marching to the sound of her own trumpet.