Kristen Stewart still loves Bella, but would have broken up with Edward "immediately"
In retrospect, the Love Lies Bleeding actor thinks her Twilight character should have been Team Herself
While Twilight is what put Kristen Stewart on the map in the first place, if it were up to the actor of today the whole franchise would have been over in approximately 30 minutes. “[Edward] was trying to control whether or not she made choices for herself, and I would have broken up with him immediately,” Stewart said of her character’s blood-sucking beau in a recent episode of the Not Skinny But Not Fat podcast. Referring to Bella’s wish to become a vampire, she continued: “I mean, if I was like, ‘Hey, I want to try that,’ and he was like, ‘No, this is for me,’ I would have been like, ‘Well, this is also just for me. My whole life, without you.’”
If only Bella had had this sort of foresight and knack for one-liners as a teen! But regardless of some of the character’s more questionable choices (like calling Jacob “biceps” which, even at the time, she thought was “so embarrassing”), Stewart still has a lot of love for her. In response to podcast host Amanda Hirsch’s query of whether or not we “like Bella” anymore, Stewart semi-jokingly responded, “Do we not like her? Woah, woah, woah. You’d better be careful. I don’t know if you can tell who you’re talking to right now.”
This tenderness does make sense; after all, in Stewart’s eyes, Bella is queer. “I don’t think it necessarily started off that way, but I also think that the fact that I was there at all, it was percolating. It’s such a gay movie,” she told Variety in January. “I mean, a Mormon woman wrote this book. It’s all about oppression, about wanting what’s going to destroy you. That’s a very Gothic, gay inclination that I love.”
Stewart currently stars in Rose Glass’ Love Lies Bleeding, as a melancholy gym employee whose life is turned around when she starts dating an enigmatic bodybuilder (Katy O’Brian) who moves to town. If you want to watch a corrective where Stewart’s character and her partner are a little too willing to support each other’s objectively bad decisions, the film is in theaters now.