Reporter’s Notebook: Kristen Stewart

Vogue.com: Where did you interview Kristen?
Eve MacSweeney: Since she had just started a year’s worth of filming of the two-part finale of the Twilight Saga in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, I went there to see her. It’s a fairly small town, so at first I thought it would be fun for her to show me around and visit the local places she likes. Wrong! I totally underestimated how hard it is for her to go anywhere without being mobbed. We met in the house of a friend of hers on a gated property, and even then, if she caught sight of a teenage girl in the distance, she would virtually drop to the floor so as not to be seen.

Vogue.com: Did anything surprise you about Kristen?
Eve MacSweeney: Since, as she herself put it, “I just can’t go to the mall,” she’s developed some unexpected hobbies. She likes golf (lots of space, not a lot of human contact), and she really is an excellent self-taught cook. She told me she reads food magazines and watches a lot of cooking shows. When we met, she made an amazing tortilla soup with all kinds of accoutrements, (see recipe here) along with pulled pork. Delicious!

Vogue.com: What did you learn about her approach to fashion?
Eve MacSweeney: She had fun with the Proenza Schouler boys in our photo shoot, and she definitely keeps a young spirit in the way she dresses, like wearing short, not long. When she’s dressing for an event she likes to keep things spontaneous—she has her stylist pull three or four looks and puts on whatever she feels best in at that moment.

Vogue.com: How does she feel about playing Bella Swan?
Eve MacSweeney: Kristen takes her responsibilities to Twilight fans incredibly seriously, because she knows how important it is to them that the Bella they see on-screen is true to the character in the books, which she reads and rereads on set. She was joking about the honeymoon scene in Brazil, which she had just come back from filming. As she tries to seduce Edward (Robert Pattinson) in a sexy negligee, the crew was urging her to “shake it up a bit.” But she said, “I was like ‘Aaaah!’ I couldn’t do it. It would have gone against everything I’ve ever been used to playing with her.”

Vogue.com: What did she tell you about her personal life?
Eve MacSweeney: She won’t talk about Rob Pattinson, which is smart of her because if she started, it would never end. And she described how she keeps her sanity by “building a perimeter of people” around her that she can have fun with and not have to feel so aware of the strange circumstances her fame imposes on her. She has a very solid, close family and is really very down-to-earth, as well as being passionate about acting and intelligent about thinking up ways she can use her success to do good. Her plan is to find a way to help teenage runaways get back on their feet, a subject close to her heart after her role in Welcome to the Rileys.