You’d be hard pressed to find a celebrity who hates promotion and publicity as much as Joaquin Phoenix.

If you’re lucky, he’s bizarrely giddy, manic and jittery and incoherent. On a good day, he’s numb. On a bad day, he’ll walk out on you. On a horrible day, he’s downright mean.

I know because I’ve had the displeasure of interviewing him myself. And it was a rough day. He was hungover, or something, and that, combined with his personal demons, and his intense distrust of the media, and his general discomfort period made it one of the worst experiences ever.

So perhaps it’s an exaggeration right now, so early, to compare Kristen Stewart. But during this round of press for Twilight, she exhibited many of the same signs – twitchiness, awkwardness, reluctance… and many journalists are now calling her out on it (read more here),especially after a particularly disastrous appearance on Letterman.

I visited the Twilight set in April – click here to read the article posted at the time. Funny reading it back now (gloating warning!)…it’s oddly prescient. And as I said at the time, Kristen is indeed “arty” pretentious. And definitely a bitch. And I love her for it now. And she can be difficult. But, in fairness to her, she’s not unprofessional.

What you’re seeing during recent interviews isn’t so much recalcitrance as it is genuine intimidation. She’s just not that kid who’s comfortable in those settings. On a movie set, cocooned in a controlled environment, it’s a completely different story. And although we’ve all seen the pot smoking shots, and no doubt she’s not unlike every other young star in the industry dabbling in happy experimentation, during the course of this press tour, even though it most certainly was not her favourite thing to do, she was not a basketcase, she was never a Lindsay Lohan style pain in the ass, she was never late, she never held others back, she hasn’t yet exploded into the kind of headache that Joaquin eventually became.

How this Twilight explosion affects her in the long term though remains to be seen. Most seem to agree that Robert Pattinson seems to be handling it better than she is. Then again, he’s the one who’s been enjoying the Hollywood party circuit, a target for the Hollywood Skank Brigade, the Lilos and Ebolas, while Kristen keeps it undercover at night, so perhaps that prediction is much too premature. Maybe she’ll be the one more grounded.

Photos from Wenn.com