Kristen Stewat embraced by two alien universes

Kristen Stewart Gap ads campaign 2006. The "T-Shirt Shop" Gap campaign celebrated self-expression and individuality. "T-shirts have become the ultimate vehicle for self-expression”, said Kyle Andrew, vice president of Gap Marketing.

"It is this nervous, very wired, “twitchy”—as she puts it—energy that has come to define Stewart. She is best known as the female lead in Twilight, the blockbuster vampire franchise, which has made her an unlikely star of both movies and tabloids. But with the Sundance debuts of two new films—Rileys and The Runaways, in which Stewart plays iconic rocker Joan Jett—Stewart is becoming known as something else: Indie “It” Girl.

No one more so than Stewart, who is, both in person and on screen, an awkward and self-effacing pixie. In Rileys, she plays Mallory, an underage prostitute in New Orleans' French Quarter who finds parental figures in Doug Riley (James Gandolfini) and his wife Lois (Leo), who have lost their own, real, daughter. Mallory, who is as damaged as the city she’s living in, hides behind thick, raccoon eyeliner, and shapeless, baggy pants and sweatshirts—at least when she’s not teetering around in hopelessly high heels, ripped fishnets, and little else. In The Runaways, she’s the harder-edged, but no less establishment-averse Jett.

Stewart is coming of age—morphing from girl to woman (she’s 19), and from teen idol to serious actress—in front of a global audience. It’s not always pretty. While doing press for last fall’s Twilight: New Moon, she was lambasted for not being press-friendly enough, and for wearing her signature scowl a little too relentlessly. Such behavior didn’t fit well with a movie designed to dazzle 13-year-old girls, and Stewart paid the price.

There are a lot of people who are like, ‘Wow, you have just turned a new leaf… You can really express yourself very, very eloquently when you care to, and, Oh! You smile sometimes!’ And it’s like: I was doing a movie! I shouldn’t have been where I was! I should have been in New Orleans! That’s why I was so completely inept. I mean, like, that’s why. Because I shouldn’t have been there.”

"It is this torn-between-two-worlds quality that makes Stewart different from other alternative-cinema queens: She is being grippingly embraced by two alien universes—mainstream Hollywood and the margins. And yet she seems passionately determined to shed the former role. Over the course of our conversation, the word “movie” is always said in respectful italics. It is clear the term does not refer to Twilight.

The Runaways premiere on Sunday evening, the red-carpet mayhem rivaled anything that Westwood has to offer: an eruption of shrieks and cellphone flashes as Stewart abashedly slunk by. The same Beatlemania broke out Saturday night during Joan Jett’s concert at Harry O’s on snow-blanketed Main Street. However much the crowd was rocking out to Jett (“Put another dime in the jukebox, baby…”), it was nothing compared to what happened when she briefly brought Stewart and her Runaways co-star Dakota Fanning out on stage. In response, Stewart shoved her hands in her hoodie and attempted to dissolve into the drum set.

Of filming Rileys in New Orleans, Stewart says, “I sort of called it home. Like, Mallory, she’s not from there, but when she moved there, it became her town. And when I was there, it felt like it was my—like, it was so calm. I would walk down the street and I wasn’t recognized. Walking down the street, compared to how I would normally feel walking down the street, it was so different. Like, I tromped around.”

Stewart’s face brightens at the memory of such freedom, which is clearly a luxury. But even at Sundance, the very womb of low-budget outsiderdom, Stewart again finds herself split, as she promotes two films, one of which is a tad more indie than the other. (Runaways already has a distributor, Apparation, and is coming out in March; it also has a splashier veneer than Rileys, which is seeking a buyer.) Having spent the afternoon talking Rileys, she’s now getting ready to dart off to the Runaways premiere.

“Talking about films that you really care about is really, like, the hardest thing for me to do, especially to people that I don’t know,” Stewart says. “So it’s scary.”“I really, really, really like these movies,” she continues, vehemently. “I put a lot into them, more so than the other ones. So to have both at the festival—it’s weird. It’s like, Jesus! It’s a little overwhelming.” Source: www.thedailybeast.com