Kristen Stewart basically slayed 2015, but she wasn’t quite given any credit for it. She was heartbreaking as the daughter of Julianne Moore’s shrinking Alzheimer’s victim in Still Alice, showed off her action chops in offbeat comedy flick American Ultra, and gave one of the year’s best performances in European indie hit Clouds of Sils Maria. For her role as a personal assistant inadvertently seducing Juliette Binoche’s ageing actress, she became the first American ever to win a César, French cinema’s top prize. Pretty impressive, right? For some reason her sterling work flew slightly under the radar last year, but she’s now perfectly poised to shake off her “Twilight star” tag for good. Here are five reasons why K-Stew will rule 2016.
1. She has more cult-sounding films coming out: Stewart has recently been cast opposite Chloë Sevigny in a thriller about Lizzie Borden; Sevigny will play the infamous axe murder and Stewart the maid who assisted her. But Stewart already has four other interesting films in post-production. She takes a lead role in Woody Allen’s next one, which is currently untitled, but boasts a typically impressive cast including Blake Lively and Jesse Eisenberg. She also stars in Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, a war comedy from Brokeback Mountain director Ang Lee, and French film Personal Shopper, a ghost story set in Paris’s fashion underworld. Perhaps most exciting is Certain Women, a drama about three women “imperfectly blazing a trail” in small-town America based on an acclaimed short stories collection by Maile Meloy. It features the dream trio of Stewart, Laura Dern and Michelle Williams — insert all those heart emojis here.
2. She says she’s “gunning” to get behind the camera too: Hollywood needs more female directors, and as a household name with a hugely successful movie franchise on her résumé, Stewart has the clout to get films made. She’s also seen her friend and mentor Jodie Foster, with whom she starred in 2002’s Panic Room, make a pretty successful transition from acting to directing. During a recent interview with Vanity Fair, Stewart said “she can’t fucking wait” to shoot her first movie, adding: “I think I’d be pretty good at getting people on the same plane and on the sort of train.” We’re inclined to agree with her.
3. She’ll kill it as a Chanel muse: Stewart has been a Chanel brand ambassador since 2013, and last year Lagerfeld got to cast her in his short film Once Upon a Time, as a spoilt actress trying to portray the fashion house’s iconic founder Coco Chanel. Stewart is also the face of Chanel’s 2015-16 Paris-Rome Métiers d’art collection, with photographs taken by Lagerfeld himself due to be unveiled this May. A few years ago, Stewart’s style would be reductively described as “tomboyish.” Now she works an original, true-to-herself look that is the epitome of contemporary, androgynous-chic.
4. She’ll keep on calling out misogyny in Hollywood and beyond: Last year Kristen Stewart wasn’t afraid to speak her mind, calling Hollywood “disgustingly sexist”, saying it’s“boring as fuck” to make being desirable your main goal in life, and predicting that “in three or four years, there are going to be a whole lot more people who don’t think it’s necessary to figure out if you’re gay or straight.” Amen to that. She and American Ultra co-star Jesse Eisenberg also highlighted the bullshit questions that actors often get asked at film junkets by “flipping the script” on one another for a Funny or Die parody. Eisenberg asked Stewart if she’d bulked up for the role, a query usually reserved for male actors, while she grilled Eisenberg on hard-hitting issues female actors are expected to tackle like how she manages to keep her skin “vibrant and young” and whether her “boobs ever slip out accidentally.” So genius. Expect to see more of K-Stew’s feisty side this coming year.
5. She won’t lose sight of who she is: Obviously Kristen Stewart’s life isn’t “normal.” She made Panic Room when she was 12 and starred in a film franchise that grossed $3.3 billion worldwide. But this doesn’t mean she’s not real. At the height of the Twilight hysteria, she was sometimes criticized for looking “bored”, “moody” or “ungrateful” — namely, the way most of us look when we’re not grinning for a selfie. But now, it’s clear she handled the massive attention admirably, avoiding social media and staying self-aware and sensible. Asked last month to pass on some advice to Star Wars‘ Daisy Ridley, Stewart replied: “Focus on the fact that you’re stoked ’cause you’re doing the work that you want to do… And if losing your anonymity or whatever doesn’t make you happy, then focus on something else.” With this pragmatic attitude to fame, Kristen Stewart will coolly navigate Hollywood’s choppy waters for as long as she wants.