Kristen Stewart responded “probably not” when asked if she thought she would stay in the US while Donald Trump remains president.
The actor is currently promoting her directorial debut feature film, The Chronology of Water, which was shot in Latvia because, Stewart said, it would have been “impossible” to do in the States.
“Reality is breaking completely under Trump,” the 35-year-old told The Sunday Times. “But we should take a page out of his book and create the reality we want to live in.”
She called Trump’s threat of tariffs on films made outside the US “terrifying” for the industry, while saying she “can’t work freely” in the States.
“But I don’t want to give up completely,” she added. “I’d like to make movies in Europe and then shove them down the throat of the American people.”
Stewart and Trump have crossed paths over the years, most memorably when he tweeted in 2012 that her Twilight co-star Robert Pattinson “should not take back Kristen Stewart. She cheated on him like a dog and will do it again, just watch. He can do much better!”
Stewart was photographed kissing her married Snow White and the Huntsman director, Rupert Sanders, while in a relationship with Pattinson. Both Stewart and Sanders issued public apologies at the time.
In 2017, she chose to come out on Saturday Night Live while hosting, in an opening monologue that mocked the US president’s past tweets about her.
“Donald, if you didn’t like me then, you’re probably really not going to like me now,” she said. “Because I’m hosting SNL and I’m, like, so gay, dude.”
She married screenwriter and producer Dylan Meyer in April last year.
The Chronology of Water has received mixed reviews, with praise for Imogen Poots in the lead role as Lidia Yuknavitch, who wrote the 2011 memoir the film is based on, as well as for Stewart’s directing.
“Stewart’s debut might play as adolescent movie poetry – young in spirit, tripping over itself – but it’s also a throwback to the Nineties indie film scene, arguably the last gasp of the awkward aspiring auteur,” critic Xan Brooks argued for The Independent.
“As such, it looks more radical than it might have done in the past. It’s defiantly at odds with today’s risk-averse business model and a pure expression of the woman who made it as opposed to, say, a pin-sharp corporate commercial like Barbie. Gerwig travelled in one direction, from the grungy mumblecore movement to the mainstream.
“Stewart, though, is steering the opposite course, from Twilight to the arthouse, while daring the fans to stick with her, and it has made for a more fun, jolting journey. Her movie is heartfelt and unrefined and ever so slightly up itself. It's altogether precious, in both senses of the word.”
Stewart remarked that the experience of directing had been liberating when compared to her work as an actor: “Actresses get treated like s***, I’ve got to tell you,” she told The Sunday Times.
“People think anyone could be an actress, but the first time I sat down to talk about my movie as a director, I thought, wow, this is a different experience, they are talking to me like I’m somebody with a brain.”
She admitted she was a “maniac” while working on the film and “barely existed outside of it but, “I’ve never felt more alive”.
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