Kristen Stewart revealed she didn’t feel seen while working on Happiest Season, despite it featuring one of the first lesbian romances in a holiday film.
“The identity was beaten out of my goals there,” Stewart, 33, told Them magazine in an interview published on Tuesday, March 19, referring to her character’s style choices in the 2020 Hulu film.
The actress recalled getting “so many studio executive notes about my hair and my clothes.”
The constant feedback threw Stewart for a loop. “I was like, ‘You did read the script. You did hire me. What are we doing here?’” she said. “It was f–king annoying.”
Looking back, Stewart thinks everything ended up “fine” because the Clea DuVall-directed project was just scratching the surface for a lesbian Christmas rom-com.
“I guess there are ways that you need to shroud things for everyone to easily digest. And I’m down with that,” Stewart explained. “And honestly, f–king hats off to Clea, because I don’t have the patience [to do] that.”
In the 2020 film, Stewart played Abby, who pretends to be straight while visiting her girlfriend Harper’s (Mackenzie Davis) family for the holidays. Abby is out as a lesbian, but Harper hasn’t been honest with her parents about her sexuality, which leads to tension between her and everyone she loves.
Happiest Season was a great success for the streaming platform, bringing in the best viewership of any Hulu original as of spring 2021. It even sparked conversations about a sequel, which Stewart’s costar Mary Holland exclusively told Us Weekly she’d be all for.
“I mean, it’s in very early stages. The story of Happiest Season was an idea that Clea had for many years,” Holland, 38, said in May 2021, noting that she’d like to reprise her role as Harper’s sister Jane. “And so it’s a personal story to her and something that I was so fortunate that she asked me to come on board to help write this.”
The actress, who also cowrote the movie, added, “I’m very, very open and very curious of where she sees it going. I do really feel like this is Clea’s story and I’m excited to see what happens.”
Stewart, meanwhile, is excited about her latest project, Love Lies Bleeding, telling Them that this movie doesn’t use the queer characters as “hidden vegetables” in a family-friendly garden.
“It’s pretty f–king sick,” Stewart said of her character Lou, who is the owner of a small-town gym. In the sexually-charged feature, Lou sparks a romance with gay bodybuilder Jackie (Katy O’Brian), who has ties to the crime world.
“What I love about this movie is that the queerness isn’t the conflict,” O’Brian, 35, told Them. “It’s the type of film that I, as a queer person, would want to watch — to not have drama around my sexuality, and to just admire these two absolutely wacky individuals.”
Stewart — who found love with fiancée Dylan Meyer in 2019 — agreed that Love Lies Bleeding is a quintessential lesbian film.
“To imply that ‘our’ experience can be in a genre of its own is dangerous. I don’t want to perpetuate that,” she explained. “We have so much unearthing to do — so much unabashed self-exploration and self-touch. We need to touch base, dude. It’s the only way to tell stories: from the inside.”
