For Kristen Stewart, Happiest Season wasn’t the happiest experience
The Love Lies Bleeding star says the amount of “studio notes about [her] hair and clothes” beat the identity “out of [her] goals"
Photo: Thomas Kronsteiner
Kristen Stewart has had a heck of a time getting her projects through the Hollywood machine without them being torn to bits. Before making the jump back to indies, she tried her hand at Charlie’s Angles, which she thought was “a good idea at the time” but “hated making.” Now, she’s saying Happiest Season, the lesbian rom-com touted as the first of its kind, wasn’t the most cheerful set either.
Speaking to Them magazine, Stewart recounts her “fucking annoying” nightmare working on Happiest Season. Apparently, the amount of “studio executive notes” about her hair and wardrobe drove her nuts. “The identity was beaten out of my goals there,” she said. I was like, ‘You did read the script. You did hire me. What are we doing here?’”
Stewart saves her ire for the studio executives who needed to “shroud things for everyone to easily digest.” She’s “down with that” but reserves compliments for director Clea Duvall. “Hats fucking hats off to Clea because I don’t have the patience [for] that.”
Considering the handwriting and criticism Happiest Season faced, Stewart’s comments probably confirm many of its detractors’ criticisms. Still, by the bottom-barrel modern standards of the genre, which was largely ceded to formulaic Hallmark and Lifetime made-for-TV movies, Duvall deserves some credit for making it a mediocre entry—even if that causes some to over-inflate its positives while ignoring its negatives. For the record, The A.V. Club liked Happiest Season just fine.
Stewart’s post-Twilight run has been more fraught than that of her co-star Robert Pattinson, who now plays the Batman and Mickey 17. Like Pattinson, Stewart has begun working with David Cronenberg, which certainly helped move her in the right direction. She even bested Pattinson by snagging an Oscar nomination first.
Her latest, Love Lies Bleeding, is “pretty fucking sick,” in her words. The A.V. Club more or less agreed. In her review, critic Lauren Coates wrote, “Full of striking visuals from cinematographer Ben Fordesman, a healthy dash of horror and sci-fi in the script, and a monumental performance from O’Brian, Loves Lies Bleeding is another surrealist sapphic gem from [director] Rose Glass.”