The princess diaries
Kristen Stewart blows critics away as Lady Diana. She’s ready to talk about it now
‘I’m a total LA scumbag,” Kristen Stewart says, bending her wrist to show me an expertly inked Los Angeles Dodgers logo. It’s the last day of last year’s Telluride Film Festival in Colorado, and we’re heading home on the same charter flight, but not before talking about Spencer, the Pablo Larrain-directed drama in which she plays Princess Diana at the moment she’s looking to break free from her loveless marriage and suffocating life during a threeday Christmas weekend at the royal family’s country mansion.
Stewart had just come from a Telluride panel titled “Recreating The Real: What It Means To Reimagine A Known Figure From The Past” and now, sitting on a patio, dressed casually on this warm Colorado day in a white T-shirt, cuffed slacks and her hair pulled back in a ponytail, she’s laughing at the idea of her being an “expert” participant at this kind of thing. Plus, she’s a little taken with the enormous golden retriever constantly looping by where we’re sitting, possibly because I had fed it half an English muffin a few minutes before she arrived.
Fact is, Stewart says she didn’t have that much wisdom to impart, other than this: You do the research and then throw it away so you can be present and impulsive. Yes, she had a dialect coach on Spencer and went to school, studying her posture. But Stewart didn’t want these things to define her performance. She wanted to be free to imagine.
“Diana’s such a live wire,” Stewart says, leaning forward. “Any picture or interview I’ve ever seen of her, there’s an explosive, ground-shaking quality to her that I always feel like you never really know what’s going to happen. Even when she’s walking the red carpet, it just feels a little bit scary. That could be projection, because we all know what happened. But she just has this feral cat feel. So I wanted to convey that. There’s no way to plan chaos. You just have to fall into it.”
As there’s some last-minute packing to do, we pushed ahead, delving into the movie and performance that had everyone at the Venice and Telluride film festivals talking.
How much of yourself is in this Diana? A lot of people found your casting to be odd, but you know about life in the spotlight. And you know how the fantasy can be different from the reality.
I’ve never been somebody who is very good at stepping outside of myself. I’m not a character actor. I’m not making any rules for myself, but the most honest work I’ve done contains my own memories. And look, I’ve never touched the monumental aspect of her fame. She was the most photographed woman in the world.
For me, it’s nice to share your work with so many people. Sometimes it’s so ephemeral, though. It’s so untouchable that it doesn’t feel real, and therefore makes you feel distanced. People thinking they know you and you feel like they don’t, and then you think, ‘Well, no one’s impression can be wrong. Whatever I’m putting out is truthful in that moment, whatever combination of details they’ve thrown together to form their impression is what it is.’
But doesn’t it bother you when it reaches the point where you feel commodified, that it’s all an image and it’s not really you and you can’t control it?
I know what it’s like to feel backed into a corner. I know what it’s like to feel defiance, and then kind of regretful of that, because then suddenly, you are being defined as rebellious. You have no idea how many times people will go, ‘So you don’t give a f*ck, huh?.’ Are you kidding? Is that really the impression? Because it’s the opposite of that. It’s so desperately the opposite. It’s a convoluted idea, but I definitely understand what it feels like to want human connection and actually, ironically, feel distanced by the amount that’s thrust at you.
As a self-described LA scumbag, did you ever feel out of place shooting at that ridiculous country estate?
Actually, I felt remarkably in place. I was so scared before we started shooting that it was going to feel theatrical, but there weren’t that many people there, so it didn’t feel large in scope. Yeah, the scope was immense, but the scale felt quite small. So you felt at home. And even though the movie’s sad and heavy, there’s an energy that’s unrelenting. I had so much fun. I felt like I was allowed to and encouraged to be a leader, because she was. It just felt like she had this effortless figurehead kind of feel. Diana just felt like everyone wanted to go with her. She’s, like, the best kindergarten teacher you could ever imagine.
So when I got to set, I had such a love for the crew, I felt every day if anyone was tired — and this could be the most arrogant sounding thing in the world and I don’t care — I just felt like, ‘Yo, if anyone ever dips, I gotcha. Like hop on and I will run us through here,’ I felt taller than I’ve ever felt.
I don’t think I need to worry about spoiling the ending. Maybe the choice of the final song is a spoiler? I don’t know. [If you don’t want to know, skip ahead.] But as 80s songs go, Mike & the Mechanics’ felt like an inspired choice for a footloose getaway.
All I Need Is A Miracle
When Pablo played that song the first time for me, I started bawling. It’s almost like a John Hughes moment at the end of this movie. Like suddenly, the female protagonist is riding off into the sunset, and then we cut back to the lame ex-boyfriend who’s a loser. It felt so triumphant.
In the film, Diana communes with the ghost of Anne Boleyn. Have you ever had any paranormal encounters?
[Laughs] No. But I felt some spooky, spiritual feelings making this movie. Even if I was just fantasising. I felt like there were moments where I kind of got the sign-off. It’s scary to tell a story about someone who’s not alive anymore and who already felt so invaded. I never wanted to feel like we were invading anything, just that we were kind of adding to the multiplicity of a beautiful thing.
Were there moments when you could actually feel Diana with you? Maybe that sounds too far out there...
I know what it’s like to feel defiance
She felt so alive to me when I was making this movie, even if it’s all between the ears and it was just a fantasy of mine. But there were moments where my body and mind would forget she was dead. And suddenly, I would just have an image of what happened. And remember who she left behind. And I was amazed by the renewed emotion. Every single time. Maybe two or three times a week, I would just fully break down about the fact that she had died. I just could not come to terms with it, because I was fighting to keep her alive every single day.
Our movie is dramatised as hell. It’s condensed into three days. It feels like a ballet to me. But it was still a fight to keep her alive every day, and so remembering that she was dead was just absolutely lacerating. It just destroyed me constantly. And that itself felt spiritual... there were times where I was like, ‘Oh, God’, almost like she was, you know, trying to break through. It was weird. And amazing. I’ve never felt anything like it in my life. © 2021 THE LOS ANGELES TIMES
Spencer is scheduled for release in Thailand tomorrow.