Film

Kristen Stewart: I was told to tone down my sexuality to land Marvel roles

The Twilight actor says she was advised to stop holding her girlfriend’s hand in public

Kristen Stewart: ‘There are people in the world who don’t like that you date girls.’ Photograph: Ettore Ferrari/EPA

Andrew Pulver
Tue Sep 3 2019 - 13:58

Kristen Stewart was told to stop holding her girlfriend's hand in public if she wanted to win mainstream movie roles, the actor has said.

In a new interview with Harper’s Bazaar, Stewart said that, before she became an established star, she had “fully been told, ‘If you just, like, do yourself a favour, and don’t go out holding your girlfriend’s hand in public, you might get a Marvel movie.’” She added: “I don’t want to work with people like that.”

Stewart had been talking to the interviewer about why she felt more able to respond to the media and film audience’s interest in her sexuality. “I was informed by an old-school mentality, which is: you want to preserve your career and your success and your productivity, and there are people in the world who don’t like you, and they don’t like that you date girls, and they don’t like that you don’t identify as a quote-unquote ‘lesbian’, but you also don’t identify as a quote-unquote ‘heterosexual’. And people like to know stuff, so what the f*** are you?

“I just think we’re all kind of getting to a place where – I don’t know, evolution’s a weird thing – we’re all becoming incredibly ambiguous. And it’s this really gorgeous thing.”

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Stewart had high-profile relationships with her fellow Twilight actor Robert Pattinson and the Snow White and the Huntsman director Rupert Sanders before revealing in 2015 a relationship with the visual-effects producer Alicia Cargile. Her most recent film, Seberg, a biopic of the troubled American film star Jean Seberg, has just premiered at the Venice film festival, while Charlie’s Angels, a rebooted adaptation of the hit 1970s TV series, also starring Naomi Scott and Ella Balinska, is due for release in November. – Guardian

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