What Kristen Stewart Taught Me

In 2008, I became obsessed with the Twilight series. Yes, that Twilight. The one that pitted sparkly vampires against extremely buff werewolves and eventually turned the words “Team Edward” and “Team Jacob” into declarations of war between friends. I still own most of the DVDs, the paperbacks, the boxed sets, the graphic novel adaptations, the movie soundtracks/scores, the special anniversary editions, and several posters, most of which are now worthless on the resale market. Sometimes I comfort myself by remembering that I never bought the Edward/Bella/Jacob action figures, which is a pretty pathetic statement to console myself with, but I digress. The poor investment decisions I made as a teenager are a whole other story.

Right now I want to focus on the star of the film, Kristen Stewart. She played Bella Swan, the main character who attracted a lot of paranormal attention. I used to watch a lot of cast interviews on YouTube, and the comments under the videos Kristen appeared in were riddled with hatred.

To the viewers she was always too awkward, too weird, too quiet, too shy, too uninterested in the interviewer, too socially inept, seemed angry, acted like she didn’t want to answer the questions, barely laughed at the interviewer’s jokes, and people wondered why she bothered going to interviews with that attitude.

And I loved it.

Classic Kristen Stewart

Years ago when I was at a family member’s house, my uncle started to ask me the typical older relative set of questions- how’s school, did you start applying to college yet, and of course the dreaded, what do you want to major in? Like many young adults, I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life when I “grew up” and this line of questioning inevitably ended with me feeling like I was behind in life.

This time was no different. My uncle asked me what I wanted to major in and I said, “marketing.”

“Oh!” he said, surprised. “You know…if you do marketing you have to be able to talk to people.”

“Yeah,” I said slowly.

“You’re very quiet,” he said, digging the knife into my self-confidence a little deeper.  

I’m sure my uncle was trying to help me find my path but back then my insecurities over what I was going to do with my life were very high and this comment didn’t help. I doubted myself even further and questioned whether I was making the right decision. Maybe I wasn’t capable of doing marketing because of my temperament.

At their core, acting and marketing are somewhat similar. What they have in common (for the most part) is that you have to sell something to someone. In marketing it’s a product, a service, or an idea. In acting, it’s a character, an emotion, a set of experiences.  You have to be able to communicate with your body language, your facial expressions, and your words whether verbal or written.

Now here was Kristen Stewart an actress who felt comfortable embodying another character on screen but seemed withdrawn when having to act as herself in an interview. Despite her obvious discomfort, with the release of every Twilight movie she appeared on the press tours. Even though she made a living off of putting herself out there in front of millions of moviegoers, she was still super awkward. 

Preach.

KStew made me feel better about myself. If she could show up on The Late Show with David Letterman and do her job then why couldn’t I? Not show up on Letterman obviously, but ignore the people who thought being outgoing was the only way to succeed in life. I know I’m awkward and I own it. I even play it up sometimes for laughs.

Now I have bigger problems besides my awkwardness… like what I’m going to do with the five copies of Twilight I own.