Words cannot even describe how much I loathe this Interview Magazine photo shoot. I guess I’m just disappointed because I always held up Kristen Stewart’s 2009 Interview Mag cover shoot to be one of her best and prettiest photo shoots ever. Her styling was gorgeous and dark and glam, and it worked beautifully on her. For this July cover, Kristen is paired with Charlize Theron, her Snow White costar, and once again the magazine tries to do “dark/glam”. They fail. If it was just Charlize alone… maybe this could have succeeded. But putting Charlize and Kristen together, styling them like extras in Cabaret… it’s just bad. In my opinion. Kristen’s look easily slips into androgyny, and the whole vibe seems very “An older dominatrix and her lithe boy-toy.” As for the interviews – they’re epic and long and you can read both of them here. I’m just going to do some excerpts from Kristen’s piece:

Working with male versus female directors: “In personal conversations between director and actor, the male directors that I’ve worked with are just as emotional [as women]. Maybe it’s because I had to start having very intimate conversations with adult men at a very young age in order to get the work, but I’m really comfortable with dudes. I mean, we push boundaries in this business in terms of getting to know people. There are things that directors know about me that people shouldn’t know. But everyone’s really different. I’ve worked with women who I’ve never wanted to tell anything about myself to, and I’ve worked with guys who have been pouring wells of emotion. So emotional availability is not a gender-specific thing.”

Relating to Snow White: “There’s so much that Snow White has been deprived of in terms of having the proper time to really develop and hone who she is. She’s put in jail at the beginning of her life, so she’s a stunted person. She has a really idealized concept of what the world is, and how people should live, and how wonderful things all can be, and there is this debilitating isolation that she feels because she has been locked away in a little cell for seven years. And I can kind of relate to that. There is something . . . It’s not the reason that I wanted to do the movie, but the fans and people who loved Twilight, they do put you on this sort of different plane where you’re not real.”

Snow White is not a ninja: “I think [the physicality] really helped define the character in a lot of ways. I liked not having to fake it, because in the original drafts of the script, Snow White kind of became this ninja person overnight who was just able to, like, own this six-foot armored man, which would never happen. We wanted everything to be, like, “Oh, f–k. She barely made it through.” Somebody my size couldn’t go into a man war and come out alive with only a sword. That just would never happen.”

On Charlize: “She is unlike anyone I’ve ever encountered. She is one of those people who walks into a room and everyone knows it… She’s a f’king movie star. It’s funny, too, because she always says, “I’m not really a performer.” But I’m like, “Yeah, not at all.” [laughs] She’s an actor and a performer.”

How she defines success: “I feel so extremely successful—and not just because I can greenlight a movie now. It’s because I’ve really only worked with people that I truly love, and I’ve only had bad experiences with one or two directors…[What was bad about those experiences…] I think it always boils down to people not being there for the right reasons, and not being there for the same reasons. It’s a miracle when things come together. But sometimes it just doesn’t happen—and when it doesn’t happen, you still have to finish the movie.

Playing an abused woman: Playing a character like Mallory [in Welcome to the Rileys] is tough. Not to discredit anyone’s personal situation or actual life, but there are so many examples of girls like that, and a film can very easily become an almost clinical rundown of what leads someone to a certain position. It’s hard to play a part like that because you want everyone who has ever walked in those shoes to be like, “Yeah, I mean, that’s the way it goes . . .” Pity is a really odd thing with abused women. You don’t want anyone to think that you feel bad—even though you might. So it was just interesting to play that part and to work with James. I went down to New Orleans to do the film and lived by myself and trudged around the city. But walking away from that character . . . It probably still hasn’t gone away completely, but for the first little while afterwards, I was so sensitive and touchy in a way that my character would never be. I was so protective and defensive of young girls, and sex in general.

She doesn’t want to talk about acting: “I think people are used to seeing actors be wide open and desperately giving of themselves, and while I do that on a movie set as much as I can, it’s so unnatural for me to do it on television, in interviews, in anything like that. I also don’t find that my process as an actor is really anyone else’s business. A lot of actors have felt like that. I mean, there’s that awesome quote where Joanne Woodward said, “Acting is like sex: you should do it, not talk about it.”

[From Interview Magazine]

If you couldn’t tell, these interviews are extremely verbose and Elvis Mitchell (the interviewer) pretty much lets Charlize and Kristen talk as much as they want in their separate interviews. I have to say… Kristen comes across a lot better when you can read all of what she has to say in context. She talks a lot about how much difficulty she has being entertaining on talk shows, and how she’s not good at delivering soundbytes, which… at least she’s self-aware, you know? She’s also not a stupid girl, in my opinion. She’s bright and she’s neurotic and she’s twitchy, of course. But she really does think about her work and how she promotes her work and… she’s more interesting than I give her credit for most of the time.

Photos courtesy of Interview Magazine.