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Kristen Stewart knows she doesn’t look very good in the ’80s pulp fiction “Love Lies Bleeding,” British filmmaker Rose Glass’ follow-up to her hit debut “Saint Maud.” Oscar nominee Stewart (“Spencer”) gives her best performance to date as Lou, whom we find with her gloved hand on the toilet. She’s a closeted, unhappy lesbian, hungry for something more, who runs a gym and sports a stringy mullet. She comes to life when she falls in love with bodybuilder Jackie (Katy O’Brian). Things take a violent turn when Lou’s past comes back to haunt her. And feeding Jackie steroids to help her win an upcoming contest in Las Vegas may not have been the smartest decision for her.
From the script stage, Stewart saw Lou clearly. “It’s like an adult comic,” he said on Zoom. “When I think about the characters, I can imagine the drawn version of him. Rose raised a lot of identity in this character subliminally. She is able to visually articulate and tonally insert his taste and her sensibilities, which is a testament to what a great storyteller she is.”
The actress embraced Lou, “this intuitive, authentically written character,” she said, “who lives in the ’80s, in the middle of nowhere, and is able to discover bands that are more alternative. Nowadays, it’s easy to do that. He just goes on Instagram. It is easy to appropriate marginal art, alternative aesthetics and, in its case, oh man! He worked very hard to be the person he is just trying to be. And the idea of this helpless girl with complex daddy issues and a short man and an inability to communicate, meeting someone who is more vivacious and more alive than being so paralyzed will allow her: she is this immovable object that collides with something with so much inertia that it dislodges itself and then cannot get out of itself. That was fun and pulpy.”
As she inhabited Lou, Stewart abandoned any sense of trying to be attractive. “I felt a sly, almost light and playful, sarcastic and ironic indulgence while playing this role, because I know it’s not necessarily what people are used to seeing in terms of their protagonists or the people around them. They are supposed to identify or desire, want to be, want to fuck. She just knew she was playing someone. My makeup artist, who is a straight white woman who I love and who is my sister, she told me, ‘You look horrible, like I’ve never seen you before.’ I can’t believe you won’t let me fix it. It looks like you’re going to die.’”
But Stewart knew what he was doing. “It feels good,” Stewart said. “I have never felt better. It’s funny how those things can go together. There’s an irresponsible, frivolous cute kid under the bleachers next to Lou, that adult comic who plays with the fulfillment of a teenage wish that Rose, as a misfit herself, inserted into the film. ‘Yeah, fuck it, just do the wrong thing.’”
While Stewart has played gay roles before, in this film the sex scenes feel unleashed. Some close-ups of her face reveal palpable sexual desire and longing. “I’ve always been someone who bases my ambition on desire,” she said. “All my work comes from a place of wanting, and also wanting people to see that, to see the open mouth, someone who needs something, someone who is looking for something… (it is) of an exhibitionist tendency. It feels good to share that feeling with many people. It can be such a lonely feeling. ‘Do you watch this gape?’ Wanting to fill that is what cinema has been for me. And it’s been a processing tool my entire life. “That’s how I approach people, articulating what those desires are.”
Glass gets credit for the choreographed sex scenes, Stewart said: “She knew how to capture that. She directed them quite precisely. “We had an intimacy coach.”
Things have changed from how they used to be, Stewart said: “In the past, I’m so happy to get away from this, it used to be normal in the script: ‘They start kissing… and then they fall.’ bed and make love. And then it would be a pitched battle. ‘How are we going to capture this? Then we’re just going to improvise. It’s your hand, what are we doing?'”
In this case, Stewart said, “the physical conversation they’re having is not the most explicit thing you’ve ever seen on film. There is no nudity in the scene (i.e.), simulated sexual intercourse. It’s more like a power play, an exchange, and a particular physical response to touch and verbiage that’s so demanding it feels real, but it’s actually not very obscene. It’s just that it’s so detail-oriented, like you recognize and talk about the physicality, the hole, the actual openness of a woman, and you don’t see it, but you feel it, and it’s really fucking satisfying. Because that is very strange.”
O’Brian, who was already in great shape before training for the film, was in the room to call back Stewart, who said he couldn’t imagine anyone else in the role. “To be honest, there was no one else,” she said. “And it’s not a conversation about scarcity. You say, ‘Wow, I don’t know what we would have done without you.'”
Another important character in the film is Ed Harris, who sports a hideous long ponytail (the actor’s own creation) as Lou’s estranged father, who is revealed to have been up to no good for decades as the town gangster and who He passed certain skills on to his daughter. “A lot of her background is toxicity, internalized shame, violence, misogyny and ways that she can scare herself,” Stewart said. Falling in love with someone and creating this mythology around your connection in order to truly believe it – you have to make it real. She is a person with a life and a story… that is now coming to the surface and that is undeniable. And love doesn’t necessarily always win, it doesn’t save us all. Sometimes it is very harmful. She makes you believe in things that don’t exist. And that’s beautiful too. The same things could be said about bodybuilding as about self-love and then through self-love, accepting the love of another person and creating a productive relationship. It’s about believing in things, but none of that exists until you invent it.”
Next: Stewart premiered another very different film at Sundance, Andrew and Sam Zuchero’s heartfelt AI love story, “Love Me,” which he met mixed response and still lacks a distributor. A robot buoy (Stewart) and a satellite (Steven Yeun) become sentient over time and create a digital universe. It’s about gender identity, falsehood, presentation, and the search for love.
After making a series of short films, Stewart is finally preparing her first feature film as a director, after years of trying to release it. “The Chronology of Water,” her adaptation of novelist Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoirs (surprise), covers issues of gender, sexuality and violence. “She’s one of my favorite fiction writers, but her memoir is a great bulldozer,” Stewart said. “It’s being filmed in Europe, which is exciting, because it’s been years. We are casting, exploring and rehearsing. It’s heartbreaking because I’m at 10 places with such a big, full plate that I’m facing right now. “It’s overwhelming.”
Watching Stewart grow is a pleasure. At 33 years old, he has many more surprises in store.