‘My life is not as dark but people do constantly stare’

The idea of playing another actress made Kristen Stewart nervous. But it was the parallels in their lives that drew the director to her. Robbie Collin reports.

The curtains part and Kristen Stewart enters, a streak of pale peach and bleached blonde framed by plush scarlet. The 29-year-old actress has just slipped into the library of an 18th-century Venetian palazzo, dressed in acid-washed jeans, a black bralette, and a deconstructed patchwork blazer that looks like it hasn’t finished downloading yet.

She blends into her surroundings like Let’s Dance-era David Bowie in a marble throne room – which is to say not at all, but also perfectly.

A decade ago, few people had the heroine of the Twilight vampire romance series earmarked as a film festival queen in the making.

Yet the night before we meet, on the red carpet for her latest movie, she gets the kind of reception usually reserved for the likes of Catherine Deneuve and Isabelle Huppert.

Stewart is unusual among her peers for having converted Hollywood franchise success into European art-house cachet: the only other actor of her generation to do so has been Robert Pattinson, her Twilight co-star and sometime paramour.

The affection runs deep. She is the only American actress ever to have won a Cesar, the French Oscar. Why does she think she and Europe clicked? ‘‘Probably for the same reasons I was thrown out of every audition for a commercial as a kid,’’ she says with a grin.

Stewart is in Venice with Seberg, a fact-based drama about the actress Jean Seberg’s hounding by the FBI in the late sixties and early seventies.

Seberg was barely 30 at the time, and best known for starring in the New Wave classic Breathless.

But in response to her vocal and financial support of civil rights groups, including the Black Panthers, the United States government vowed to ruin her, brutally and publicly. She was relentlessly surveilled. Her telephones were tapped. False stories were planted about the questionable parentage of her unborn child, who died after Seberg subsequently went into premature labour.

In 1979, at the age of 40, she committed suicide; her death was blamed by Romain Gary, her second husband, on the preceding decade of FBI harassment.

The film, directed by Benedict Andrews, presents all this in the style of a paranoid thriller, with Jack O’Connell and Vince Vaughn as two of the agents tasked with bringing her down, and

Stewart as Seberg herself.

The idea of playing another actress made Stewart nervous. ‘‘Anything that’s Google-able is intimidating,’’ she explains. ‘‘Because [people] can do the side-by-side thing.’’

But Andrews had sought her out for the role specifically because of the parallels between the pair’s lives. As he noted in Venice: ‘‘Both were thrust into the public eye at a young age, and both managed to survive intense media attention.’’

Stewart bridles a little at the comparison, but concedes the wider point.

‘‘There’s obviously a darkness, and an intensity to Jean’s story that my life is not steeped in,’’ she says. ‘‘But, I am so aware of the fact that people are constantly staring at me. So this was not a job that required a wild imagination.’’

To capture Seberg’s growing paranoia, Stewart says she had to allow herself to ‘‘fall into the holes of it – the same ones I try to skip over in my own life’’. ‘‘I can be sitting in a restaurant and see people trying to listen to things. But I’ve given up worrying about it. I’ve relinquished any claim to my life being anything else.’’

Shruggy candour is Stewart’s default register: it’s what you’d expect from a Hollywood doyenne with nothing to lose, rather than an actress yet to reach 30. Last year, she disclosed that, after coming out as bisexual in 2017, she’d been advised not to let herself be photographed holding female partners’ hands in public because maintaining a more conventional image ‘‘might get [her] a Marvel movie’’.

She didn’t take the tip, and has been pictured since with girlfriends including singer St Vincent, model Stella Maxwell, and, currently, screenwriter Dylan Meyer. These completely non-scandalous images have helped to normalise the idea, still thorny even five years ago, that a young, successful film star could also be openly gay.

And while the Marvel film did not materialise, she did recently co-star in a reboot of Charlie’s Angels: not a box office hit (it barely scraped back its production budget) but a change of pace nevertheless.

As we speak, the release of Charlie’s Angels is still a couple of months off, and Stewart seems a little perplexed that it’s a film she has actually made. Elizabeth Banks, its writer and director, told Stewart: ‘‘‘I have so much fun with you. Why aren’t