Kristen Stewart Says Her Rolling Stone Cover Was Controversial Because It Was ‘Not Designed for, Desired by’ Straight Men | Video

Rolling Stone published an interview with Kristen Stewart on Valentine’s Day that quickly incensed conservatives across the U.S. (the magazine described them as “terrified” in a piece on Sunday) because she dared to express her sexuality in a way that is not overtly tailored to the male gaze. As she put it in an interview for her upcoming film “Love Lies Bleeding,” the “existence of a female body thrusting any type of sexuality at you that’s not designed for, desired by exclusively cis, straight males, is something that people are not super comfy with.”

The wide-ranging interview shows a Stewart who is and isn’t the same woman who played Bella Swan in “Twilight,” who dated her costar a million years ago and still faces questions about it to this day.

“Rob and I can’t just keep talking about that s–t, because it’s f–king weird,” Stewart said. “It’s like if someone kept asking you — I mean for literally decades — ‘But senior year in high school?’ You’re like, ‘F–king A, man! I don’t know!'”

This is a grown-up Stewart, a fully realized woman who has owned her sexuality completely.

“There are sort of moments in time that you’d like to encapsulate and sort of make a little collaborative art project about a moment in your life, and that’s kind of all that was,” Stewart explained of the photo shoot at a press conference for her film at the Berlin International Film Festival. “That’s what the magazine gives people the opportunites to do.”

“It was like… I love how the writer of the story, who is great and shaped it really well, and I had a really nice time with her, called the story ‘uncensored’ — and then the whole cover was censored,” Stewart noted, “because the existence of a female body thrusting any type of sexuality at you that’s not designed for, desired by exclusively cis, straight males, is something that people are not super comfy with. And so I’m really happy with it, I had a good time.”

She added that her current project influenced the accompanying photo shoot to a degree.

“We did this movie and it was like the person that we normally don’t listen to, the person that we normally don’t look at, she’s up front and center in her movie,” Stewart said, “and toying with the idea of strength. Because the interviews that we do as artists, as female artists, are so prescriptively pushing this idea of empowerment, because that makes everyone more comfortable at the fact that we’ve been so oppressed.”

“It’s definitely OK to take things, different pictures, mix them up in a way that people aren’t used to, and go, you know, that’s OK too,” Stewart added. “In fact, it’s pervasive and it’s everywhere and it’s being denied. And it’s crazy that it’s not… it’s crazy that there aren’t more pictures like that. It wasn’t that big of a deal.”

Stewart plays gym manager Lou in the Rose Glass-directed thriller “Love Lies Bleeding.” Her character has a crush on bodybuilder Jackie (Katy O’Brien), who is training to win the U.S. Female Body Building Championships in Las Vegas. As described in TheWrap’s review, “It’s a push-and-pull plot that sees family members pitted against one another, jealousy and trauma coming to light and revenge unraveling to an exponential degree.”

Stewart was asked about the fact that the movie is clearly a queer story, but not a story about coming out, which is still relatively novel in 2024 — and something that she supports.

“I think we can’t keep doing that thing where we tell everyone how to feel and where we sort of pat each other on the back and receive brownie points for providing space for marginalized voices,” Stewart said, “and only in the capacity that they are allowed to speak about that alone.”

“I think adjacent perspectives of well-worn stories, we’ve all been here the whole time, throughout … I think the era of them being, of queer films being so pointedly only that is done. It’s over,” she added.

Watch the Berlin International Film Festival interview with Kristen Stewart and Rose Glass in the video above.

The post Kristen Stewart Says Her Rolling Stone Cover Was Controversial Because It Was ‘Not Designed for, Desired by’ Straight Men | Video appeared first on TheWrap.