Interview

In an era when a vapid teen sex comedy seems to be the plat du jour for adolescent actors, 15-year-old Kristen Stewart is charting her own much more interesting path through the system. The toughness and maturity of her performance four years ago as the diabetic daughter of a recently divorced woman played by Jodie Foster in David Fincher's claustrophobic thriller Panic Room (2002) was enough to put the world on notice. Her work since, with directors ranging from Mike Figgis (Cold Creek Manor, 2003) to David Gordon Green (Undertow, 2004) and Jon Favreau (Zathura), has done nothing but enhance that impression. This year she will appear in three very different films: Griffin Dunne's Fierce People, a family drama in which she stars opposite Diane Lane, Donald Sutherland, and Anton Yelchin; Jonathan Kasdan's In the Land of Women, a romantic comedy with The O.C.'s Adam Brody and Meg Ryan; and The Messengers, from Hong Kong horror maestros Danny and Oxide Pang.

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JON FAVREAU: Hello. 

KRISTEN STEWART: Hi. Thanks for doing this, man. I'm totally stoked.

JF: Oh, I'm stoked to do it. Peter Berg interviewed me for one of these years ago [June 1998]. I wanted to be more prepared than he was. 

KS: [laughs] Oh, so you know about my background now? 

JF: I know everything about you. I would have never hired you had I known all this about you. [laughs] So, first of all, how are you doing?

KS: I'm good. I've been sick for the last two weeks. I've had a cold that I cannot get rid of. It's kind of embarrassing. I was in a read-through yesterday and I just gurgled during the entire thing. It was so quiet in there. It was for Sean Penn.

JF: Was that the first time you met him? 

KS: Yeah, it was. He called my agent a week ago and just asked if I'd come in and read cold, and then the first time I met him was yesterday. It was a table read. David Spade was there. Emile Hirsch was there. That was cool. He's so good.

JF: So was your throat gurgling or your stomach gurgling? 

KS: Luckily, it was my throat. But I was also sniffing every five seconds. And the thing is, I was reading the narrator part, so I was constantly doing these really long blocks of dialogue. 

JF: Well, hopefully they knew you were sick and not a drug user. I auditioned for Sean once. It was for I am Sam [2001], for the part of one of the mentally challenged people. I figured, Okay, I'll read this to read with Sean. And then it was him in his trailer on the set of the movie and me reading in front of him trying to play a mentally challenged person, which is not easy to do without making a complete ass of yourself. I actually got beat out for the part by someone who indeed did have Down syndrome, so that's sort of a consolation. Anyhow, you're working your ass off now, and all the movies you're doing seem like good projects. What was your first big role? Was it Panic Room?

KS: Yeah.

JF: I visited that set because I know Dwight Yoakam, who was in the movie.

KS: Oh, yeah? He's so funny. Did you get to go into the house?

JF: Yeah, I walked around the whole thing. 

KS: Everything in the house in Panic Room worked. Every outlet, every sink, everything. There's a scene where Jodie Foster takes a minute to go pee, and you could hear it when she got up and flushed the toilet. 

JF: She's really peeing in that scene? 

KS: [laughs] No. I don't know. Maybe.

JF: Were you around in the beginning when Nicole Kidman was involved with the movie? 

KS: Yeah. She hurt her knee. Then Jodie came in. 

JF: It's funny because you look so much alike, you could be her daughter.

KS: Everyone always says, "Kristen got Panic Room because she looks like Jodie Foster." But it was actually Nicole Kidman who was supposed to play my mother.