As Twilight fever reaches a peak with the release of New Moon this week, we meet the most famous girl in the world.
She’s been to six countries in 14 days – and it’s not over yet for Kristen Stewart. In Sao Paulo, Brazil, hundreds of teenage fans invaded the Grand Hyatt hotel where she was staying – with two teenage girls even swimming across the pool to get close to her.
The usually sedate city of Paris erupted into Twilight-mania and a new round of speculation about her rumoured romance with co-star Robert Pattinson after they were spotted holding hands.
But the 19-year-old is finally coming to terms with stardom, emerging from her shy teenage years to become the bona fide star of the next decade.
In the past 12 months she’s also been anointed one of the world’s most in demand cover girls.
With two more Twilight films to come, she is also branching out into more eclectic roles, playing rocker Joan Jett in The Runaways and a man in K-11, about a segregated unit in the Los Angeles County Jail which houses gay and transsexual inmates. And she is in talks to make An American Girl, a movie about a girl who joins the Marines to escape her small town.
Talking to Grazia, Kristen says that after struggling to cope with the attention focused on her after the first Twilight film, she’s finally coming to grips with her new life.
“I think I’ve gotten a lot more comfortable with talking about myself,” she says. “That always intimidated me so much that I minced every word. I couldn’t finish a sentence because I was so concerned about how it was going to sound.
“As soon as I stopped trying to control everything that came out of my mouth and every picture that came out, that’s when I became so much happier and it was so much easier to deal with. I’ve grown into being able to not care as much.”
She describes tabloid rumours about her life and the are-they, aren’t-they stories about her and Robert as “a ridiculous show” and a soap opera, but has now found a way to enjoy the mania around her.
“There’s already a lot of stuff where I have to say, ‘OK, Kristen, be here. Experience it. Make sure that this isn’t another fleeting situation that you’re going to barely remember.’
“You have to force yourself to sort of be present, but I feel I can choose moments that I want to remember and I have to focus on remembering the cool moments. I’ve had the coolest two years and I’m so lucky.”
Shooting New Moon, she says, was a maturing process for both her and her character Bella.
“I had a really good time on this movie. It was really intense, just because of the nature of the story, it goes in a completely different direction."
Buy Grazia magazine on sale now for the full story.
