Kristen Stewart accepted Princess Diana role before reading the script
The Twilight actor, who plays Princess Diana in Spencer, hit agree without even reading. Who does that?
Film News Diana
She may be one of the biggest actors of her generation, but Kristen Stewart is also just like us. Stewart received a large amount of text, and rather than spend the time reading the script for Spencer, she just said, “fuck it,” and hit agree like it was an Apple user agreement or something. Well, maybe not exactly like that. According to IndieWire, the Twilight star was so eager to work on director Pablo Larraín’s Princess Diana “tone poem” that she didn’t even read the script before accepting the role of Princess Di.
“He called me on the phone,” Stewart said during a broadcast conversation at the Toronto Film Festival. “At first I hadn’t read the script yet, and he proposed this idea and said he was doing this sort of weird tone poem about Diana, and asked whether or not I would be interested in tackling the subject at all, before he sent the script. Kind of without thinking, very irresponsibly, I said ‘Yes, absolutely.’”
“I could have totally fucked it up,” Stewart said. Of course, while many of us agree to things online all the time (cookies, user agreements, sending money to a Nigerian prince/long lost cousin in need), most of those decisions aren’t filmed and screened for the public. Nevertheless, Stewart felt compelled to take the roles sight unseen. “In the moment right before I was going to say, in a word, yes or no, I was like ‘Who are you if you don’t say yes?’”
It seems like her leap of faith paid off. Writing from the Venice Film Festival, Leila Latif praised the film in a dispatch for The A.V. Club:
Perhaps the most lauded performance of all at Venice was also the most nervously anticipated. After all, who would have thought that Kristen Stewart could pull off the role of the people’s princess? Well, pull it off she did, accent and all, in Pablo Larrain’s latest. Set at the Royal Family’s eerie Sandringham estate from Christmas Eve to Boxing Day, not long before Charles and Diana would finally split, Spencer is an intoxicating blend of tragic, funny, and terrifying. It’s a film that has more in common with The Shining than The Crown.
Whether you agree to see it or not, Spencer is coming to theaters on November 5.
15 Comments
Maybe her agent is Louis Darnell?
Filmmakers who use tone poem to describe their films don’t, I suspect, actually know what a tone poem is.
And this is important, why?
Eh. So what? I’m by no means famous, but even as a lowly regional theatre actor, I’ve booked gigs without reading the script. You get excited to work, so you say yes. It ain’t that deep.
Eh. I don’t think this is that big a deal.
Well seeing as there are always stories about actors auditioning for things without even having the real script to read or knowing the actual name of the movie they’re auditioning for, I bet a lot of people have done such a thing.
“Not me, though….”-Bill Murray
I read French Stewart for some reason.
I’d pay to watch that film. This one, not so much
French Stewart as Lady Di, John Lithgow as Queen Elizabeth, Kristin Johnson as Prince Charles and Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Prince William in 3rd Rock From Windsor Castle.
plus Jane Curtin as John Major
Larraín has a formula: the real person mixing with a heavily fictionalized supporting cast in a “tone poem” editing style set against magic hour. Actors commit to a Larraín film in the same way they say yes to the MCU: you get what you get.
Isn’t this how Bill Murray ended up in the Garfield movie?
Imagine if it turns out Spencer is a stealth Garfield sequel.