In her March Rolling Stone cover, Kirsten Stewart drips sweat-slicked sex appeal — and she’s doing it for her own gaze, not anyone else’s view of gender or sexuality.
“I want to do the gayest f—ing thing you’ve ever seen in your life,” the “Twilight” alum said Wednesday about the cover, which shows a mulleted Stewart sporting a leather vest-jockstrap ensemble.
The cover photo shoot is an ode to both her forthcoming ’80s queer thriller “Love Lies Bleeding” — which debuted at this year’s Sundance Film Festival and will be released by A24 in March — and her queer identity.
Stewart’s non-gender-conforming streak started to surface in her portrayal of broody heroine Bella Swan in the “Twilight” saga, which the actor said in a January interview with Variety had a “very Gothic, gay inclination.”
Now, she’s going full throttle.
“If I could grow a little mustache, if I could grow a f—ing happy trail and unbutton my pants, I would,” she told Rolling Stone Contributing Editor Alex Morris for her cover story. “Guys — I’m sorry — but their f—ing pubes are shoved in my face constantly, and I’m like, ‘Ummmm, bring it in.’”
In the comments under Rolling Stone’s Instagram post about the cover story, some are instructing Stewart to “show some class.” Others lauded what Morris called Stewart’s “hyper-sexualized, left of andro” statement.
“A queer person pushing the boundaries and making the cis-hets uncomfortable… LOVE to f— see it,” one Instagram user wrote.
In her cover story, Stewart said she considers herself to be “very fluid” in her gender and sexual identities — a fluidity manifested in outtakes from the cover shoot that show the actor pairing muscle tanks and pointelle briefs.
“I look at these kiddos that are so chilling on all of those fronts, and can have [gender] be like an accessory, can actually play with the novelty of that — have [femininity] one day, not have it the next,” Stewart said. “I’m so aware of these things.”
It’s just one of the ways she senses generational gaps among queer people. Another, she said, is in the mainstream media’s growing acceptance of artists whose queerness infuses their work.
“It goes: Jodie [Foster], me, Boygenius. I’m in the middle,” she said. “Jodie had such a hard time, and I’m not speaking for her — I am objectively analyzing the time and place in which she was being her, and that is not easy.”
“For me, it wasn’t a problem,” she added. “But that’s probably because of the sort of space that I inhabit and the parts that I’m attracted to and the filmmakers that are attracted to me and the audience that exists for those movies.”
Such is the case for “Love Lies Bleeding,” in which Stewart takes on the role of butch gym manager Lou, who falls for bisexual bodybuilder Jackie (Katy O’Brien).
Stewart said Lou is an unconventional lead.
“It was really fun to be allowed to have the little … sister be the main protagonist,” she said, saying that playing Lou was like returning to a blank slate.
“It is a really weird, kind of moving return to form in some way. Kind of like who you are when you’re 11 — physically, the clothes you choose to wear — before you’ve just been pummeled by male expectation.”
