Kristen Stewart’s voice

Kristen Stewart’s feature directorial debut, The Chronology of Water, opens in limited theaters this weekend before expanding nationally in January. The film’s distributor, indie outfit The Forge, is also mounting a little-engine-that-could awards campaign for the film and Stewart. Serving both the film’s release and the trophy trail, KStew is in The Hollywood Reporter talking about the film, directing, and women in film.

She had a viral moment last month after the Academy Women’s Luncheon in which she gave a fiery—for her—speech about representation and how women are marginalized for telling their own stories.

 

Every woman has a right to use their true voice. If you told me twenty years ago that Kristen Stewart—the awkward, shy child actor—would turn into one of the most compelling figures of her generation and be giving speeches like that to her peers, I would not have believed you. But she knows of what she speaks, she has worked hard, and through considerable public derision and disdain, to carve her place in Hollywood.

She talks more about that in her interview, saying, “When you’re a woman working in this business, you make your perspective a little different in order to be heard — you twist yourself into a palatable shape. We are all walking pretzels.”

She used the word “angry” in her Academy luncheon speech, but Stewart doesn’t really sound angry in her new THR interview. She just sounds wise. Which for a thirty-something can be a bit rich, but she’s been acting since she was a child, she’s been through the franchise meatgrinder, at one point, she was one of the most famous women in the world. She’s earned her stripes in the industry, so she isn’t talking out of her ass when she criticizes how women are treated within it, even in the supposedly more female friendly post #MeToo era. 

You can hear the sincere emotion in her voice during her speech when she talks about how hard it is to find your voice and more, to trust it. We saw Stewart go through all steps and stages of that process. When people talk about growing up in front of the camera, the assumption is that we’re talking about a cute kid hitting milestones in a procession of appropriate, adorable ways. But a lot of the time, it looks more like Kristen Stewart’s path, littered with mistakes—some huge, glaring mistakes—and awkward phases that can poison perception for years. 

But Stewart came out the other side more or less whole. She’s used her voice in many ways in the years since her Twilight hysteria heyday. She came out on national TV while taunting a president weirdly obsessed with her personal life, she’s married and settled down, she’s making the films she wants to make, even if that film is challenging and sure to polarize everyone who sees it. As a longtime fan, and as someone who got to see the kindness under the public posturing, I’m glad Kristen Stewart found her voice, learned to trust it, and is using it. 

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