This first look at Kristen Stewart as Princess Diana is truly a moment
Aux Features Fictional characters
We all knew Kristen Stewart was going to be incredible as Princess Diana, and yet somehow we have managed to be absolutely floored by this first look at the actress in Spencer. Directed by Pablo Larraín—whose Jackie was instantly iconic—and based on a script by Steven Knight—who somehow made a compelling movie featuring Tom Hardy driving around for over an hour while talking to people on speaker phone about cement????—Spencer is an unconventional biopic that follows the late Diana over the course of one pivotal weekend. Behold the full image below:
Principal photography has begun on the film, which is aiming for a fall 2021 release. Spencer co-stars Timothy Spall, Sally Hawkins, and Sean Harris, and is described in the press release as follows:
December, 1991: The Prince and Princess of Wales’ marriage has long since grown cold. Though rumours of affairs and a divorce abound, peace is ordained for the Christmas festivities at Sandringham Estate. There’s eating and drinking, shooting and hunting. Diana knows the game. This year, things will be a whole lot different.
Intrigue! Of course, we all know how the marriage ends, but we also knew Stewart would probably stun as Princess Di and yet found ourselves gagged by this photo all the same.
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Catty royals verbally sparring at Christmastime, but with Charles instead of Henry the Second? The Weasel in Winter? The Gerbil?
Much Ado About Reboots
The film opens with Charles saving Diana from getting run over outside her high school.
If you’re trying to say that Prince Charles is a vampire…well…sure I’d buy that.
As Doctor Who established in 2006, the Royal Family are actually werewolves.
Stacks up – classic features of vampires and werewolves overlap with sufferers from porphyria – a hereditary disease with famous sufferers in the royals’ bloodline.
She and her werewolf paramour die in a car crash.
FIN
A very selective credit for Steven Knight, choosing one of the 2 (?) genuinely great films he’s written and ignoring the 10+ middling-to-awful things he’s done.
Agreed, except I don’t know if you’re thinking of Eastern Promises or Dirty Pretty Things as the other (I think all three are really good). After those, though, freaking yikes.
Definitly Eastern Promise for me! Great film.
Eastern Promises, although I haven’t seen Dirty Pretty Things so happy to add it to the win column.
Definitely recommend Dirty Pretty Things, directed by the great Stephen Frears (and definitely has a kind of Grifters meets Eastern Promises vibe to it). It’s the movie, I think, that truly put Chiwetel Ejiofor on the map – after I saw it, when I’d hear he was attached to a movie it made me want to seek it out.
I think those two are actually his only great scripts. Locke succeeds much more on the strength of Tom Hardy’s acting ability when he refrains from snacking on scenery.
Also Peaky Blinders and Who Wants to be a Millionaire, on the small screen. He’s certainly… Prolific.
“We all knew Kristen Stewart was going to be incredible as Princess Diana”
…..um…we did?
“…nope.”-Justin Theroux, The Leftovers
This is the AV Club. All new things are the best, most wonderful, and greatest thing of its kind.
You beat me to it. I was going to say that not only do I think she WON’T be incredible, I’m looking forward to a hopefully Mommy Dearest level of camp.
I struggle to find a famous person with less charisma or range than Kristen Stewart.
Sam Worthington.
I said famous.
Believe it or not, Sam Worthington was the star of a movie that made over a billion dollars at the box office. You just forgot because it’s Sam Worthington, the world’s most forgettable man.
A new challenger appears as Jai Courtney enters the arena!But no-one noticed.
No lie, there have been times where I’ve been watching a movie that I’ve seen more than once where I’ve said “wait, Jai Courtney is in this?”
Who cares about his acting. He’s just delicious to look at.
I loved him as the DA on Law and Order
I don’t really have an opinion on him one way or another, but I wonder if being forgettable makes an actor better in the sense that we don’t look at the character they’re playing and immediately think “Oh look it’s just Tom Cruise doing a British accent” or whatever.
In her big-budget paycheque movies she visibly doesn’t give a shit but in indie movies she’s wonderful. You’re entitled to your opinion but there’s a reason why she has a closet full of award statues from critics associations and the festival circuit.
I looked it up, because I was curious. She won two awards for Clouds of Sils Maria (National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Supporting Actress and New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Supporting Actress) and one for Welcome to the Rileys (Milan International Film Festival Best Actress). Literally every other award is for Twilight or Snow White. Not a very big closet full. But hey, if you like her, that has no impact on my life at all.
Wikipedia lists 15 acting awards she’s won from festivals and critics associations and none of them are from twilight or snow white. idk why people insist on arguing about easily googled facts but here’s the linkhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_awards_and_nominations_received_by_Kristen_Stewart
I googled “Awards won by Kristen Stewart” and a table of about 30 awards popped up. I just couldn’t care enough about Kristen Stewart to look any further. But I apologize. She’s much greater than I’ve given her credit for. You knew better.
Watching her trying to be funny in the “Charlie’s Angels” flick last year was like watching a Terminator try to learn and mimic human emotion.
But Terminators mimicking human emotion can be funny.
Talk to the hand.
This line about her is so boring by now. Is she the best? No. Is she the worst? No. She’s done good films. Maybe you’re only thinking of Twilight?
Depends. Will her Diana performance require her to express emotions?
She’s a great actress so the only trepidation I’d worry about is casting an American as a famous British person. Accents can be tricky, even for actors who are talented at other facets of their craft. For some reason it seems that Brits can imitate American accents pretty flawlessly (Hugh Laurie, Daniel Radcliffe, Christian Bale, Gary Oldman etc) but it is way more difficult for Americans to do believable accents. Of course, there are exceptions.
We did not, as that is not a thing. Can we please stop trying to make it a thing? Because it’s not.
Yes. Because we’ve seen Clouds of Sil Maria, Personal Shopper, Holiday Season, etc, etc…
I’ve seen two of those and I’m still not impressed. Unless the empathy and emotion of a wooden door was the range she was supposed to convey.
o man, i really tried with all these movies – including ‘still alice,’ which was the first movie i saw her in.
i really want to like her, because everyone here seems to enjoy her work, but… egad, i just don’t get it.
In fairness to Kristen Stewart, she already has that perpetual “I have a tummy ache and I’m about to rush to the toilet to throw up” look about her, ready for the obligatory bulimia scenes … But what about the rest of the movie?
My theory is we’re all living in a Twilight Zone episode where Kristen Stewart is the star and in the first act she was a frumpy nobody who wished she was a star, and now we’re in the third act where she realizes she hates being a star, but she’s trapped because its…the Twilight Zone.
I thought it was just the AV Club being over effusive, but that image of her as Princess Di was on the front page of a couple of the national newspapers here in the UK yesterday! In the middle of national lockdown drama, vaccine drama, brexit drama …Youre right, this must be the twilight zone.
The complete and utter perfection of post-Twilight Kristen Stewart is an article of faith among AVC writers, so, yeah, I guess they did.
…But what this comment presupposes is, she won’t be.But I like Stewart and actually think she will be.
Yeah, where is this consensus coming from? She’s never been a particularly good actor at all.
“You know it, I know it, everybody knows it.”-I forget the guy’s name
Yeah, who the hell said THAT? Cause my reaction was more
Yes, while I’m happy to concede that the flack she received for Twilight was excessive, this apparent overcorrection to “she’s actually the world’s greatest actor!” also seems a bit much to me.
She’s a queer woman. Of course she’s incredible by default.
Anyone paying attention did.
whose Jackie was instantly iconicWas it, though? I know we’re all being gay or gay adjacent idiots here — Jackie was iconic, being gagged by the photo — but the only things I remember about Jackie are the score, which slapped, and Portman’s insane accent. “I will waulk with Jack” pops into my head regularly.But anyway, as a lady gay, I am contractually obligated to see this. I’m also obligated to watch Elizabeth Debicki’s turn as Diana on The Crown next season, because as Viola Davis once said, “Elizabeth is 6’3.”
Okay so basically any formatting in comments is going crazy on AV Club today and resulting in the link disappearing and the linked word moving to the front of the sentence, but I’m gonna leave this inscrutable shit up, and only clarify the missing Twitter link:
On the other hand, I bet Viola Davis has said period multiple times.
I mean, that was Jackie’s accent.
To me, it sounded very much like someone doing an impression rather than actually nailing the accent.
According to Mick LaSalle, arguably the greatest living American film critic since Ebert passed, Jackie, in fact, sucks beans:Laughably off-key and relentlessly dull, “Jackie” offers a postmodern vision of Jacqueline Kennedy, in which the tall, elegant first lady is depicted as a small, be-wigged nervous wreck. It is a mess of a film, botched but also misconceived, with a central performance by Natalie Portman that evokes nothing about Jackie Kennedy beyond the stylish clothes and the secret smoking.
Pardon my ignorance, but what’s the connection with being gay and a princess Di biopic? Was she a major champion of gay rights or something?
lol, no; I’m both cheekily referring to the slang borrowed from LGBTQ communities, such as Britt saying that we were “gagged” by the picture; and referring to Stewart, an object of desire for many queer women. Although, now that you mention it, Diana being publicly unafraid to hug, shake hands with, or otherwise touch those living with HIV/AIDS during the course of her charity work was a great force for the de-stigmatization of it.
I HAVE SO MUCH TO LEARN.
“We all knew Kristen Stewart was going to be incredible as Princess Diana, and yet somehow we have managed to be absolutely floored by this first look at the actress in Spencer.”Pardon the curmudgeonly-ness, but remember when the writing on this site used to be at least marginally above industry rag-level?
Just post after post of cheerleading for the insanely famous. The AV Club has become worshipful of fame and guilty of rabid hyperbole. Everything is the greatest, the best, or important, and every actor/actress/musician is legendary or iconic. I was actually stunned to see so many “C’ grades on the site today because you have to really suck shit to get anything less than a “B” from them.
Now to be fair, they also write plenty of articles about how certain people are worse than Hitler and need to die in the street like dogs while we pelt them with rotten fruit. Those are the two grades: A+++, or F—.
True, and who can forget the endless parade of pop singers I must like lest I risk permanent banishment to pre-poptimism Siberia.
Could be worse. Could be another Cardi B circle jerk.
It seems like the comment section here only knows Kristen Stewart from Twilight. Watch Personal Shopper or Clouds of Sils Maria.
I’ve been enjoying how the two main stars of Twilight – which, let’s be honest, was a charisma black hole of a franchise, even if the actors are otherwise great – are going hard into interesting and weird directions. I wish more actors who were basically set for life would just take the most interesting projects they could.It’s a shame that Taylor Lautner hasn’t been able to do the same thing.
agreed, Stewart and Pattinson pump out some legit good work.
lol “pump”.
They’re both a lot better than they get credit for being. Pattinson is finally getting the recognition he deserves. He’s easily one of the best actors working today. Stewart still gets so much hate. I don’t fawn over her but she’s made some good choices and some fun ones. I don’t get the hate toward her.
Me neither. I actually really like her and Pattinson as actors, and think it’s lame for people to cite Twilight—which was 13 freaking years ago from the first film, when they were kids—as a legitimate excuse for all the hate. People need to grow the F up. I also think the fact that Stewart doesn’t play into the whole crowd-pleasing starlet persona really pisses some people off.
Daniel Radcliffe also falls into this category – the guy has been in some weird shit post Harry Potter. Also, as an aside, I’m currently watching the Harry Potter movies for the first time (with my kids) and is it just me or are they not very good? Like, to give one example, why are they all filmed in weird grey-tones? Anyway when I’m watching them I just keep asking myself how these movies became the defining pop-culture juggernaut of the 00’s.
He’s great at that, and anyone who appears in Swiss Army Man as a farting corpse should be applauded for how much fun they’re having with their career.
Daniel Radcliffe and Elijah Wood, although they’re kind of the same person. Tiny pretty fellow, made bank young in a ginormous franchise, and have been doing really fun, weirdo shit ever since.
You clearly haven’t seen the seminal Sharkboy & Lava Girl
That predates both Twilight and potentially puberty.
Probably had to do with his ugly chipmunk face and lack of acting talent. They auditioned that kid’s body and stopped worrying there.
Depp pretty much did that after leaving 21 Jump Street for a movie career. He was in a lot of movies that barely anybody went to see. Then he wanted to start playing a drunken pirate…
I never saw Twilight or had any interest in it but I’ve liked both of them in subsequent projects. Much to my surprise.
I also thought Stewart was terrific in the not very good Seberg and in Certain Women. Admittedly, no one comes out of the Twilight movies looking great. (Well, maybe Michael Sheen for the sheer what-the-fuckness of his performance.)
Clouds is fantastic.
Side note: Sils Maria is worth it just for the Movie within the movie alone. 🙂
I did. She’s a big dull dud there too, but at least it perfectly fits French cinema.
I’m sorry foreign films are too much for you. I’m sure you can find all the police academy movies streaming.
It’s cute you went to the “Hey, this guy must like the dumb movies because he hatea my AAART”, but as someone whose favorite film is The Seventh Seal, it’s off-base. Much like Kristen Stewart’s attempt at registering emotion in many of her performances.But your reply was adorable, I want to give you a parental pat on the head. You tried, and that’s a good thing.
yOuR rEpLy WaS aDoRaBle
I have seen her in other stuff and thought she was good (though of the two Twilight leads, Pattinson has impressed me more). It’s just funny, this AV Club memorandum that apparently went out that now they shall say nothing but glowing things about her. In general, every pop culture figure they write about is either Bad or Good (in terms of talent or personal morality, and often the two are conflated) and their articles about these people flow rigidly down those channels, rarely breaking their banks for a bit of appealing uncertainty and chaos.Maybe she’ll be good in this. Probably, even. What this still photo from the production was supposed to do to convince me of that is still a mystery.
We knew she would be stunning in Spencer. We have always known, since the misty, predawn ages, when man struck the first spark and hacked the first tools from the soft wood of the acacia tree and dreamed the first dream of an adequate actress one day starring in a biopic about a famous dead person. And now, here we have it, indelible proof—a single, perfect image, limned in portent—of the sheer stunning-ness of Stewart-cum-Spencer. Do you not weep, sir or madam? Weep at the overwhelming beauty, at the veritable “I can’t even” of it all?
You, sir, should write genuinely toothsome commentary for this publication instead of the small army of content hacks they currently employ.
We know who she is. What we don’t know is what the fuck happened to the AV Club.
She was also tremendous in Seberg and I thought kicked ass in Underwater. She was the best thing about Happiest Season, as well. She’s been very good for a long time.
Hell, she was really fun in Underwater (the last movie I saw at an indoor theater pre-plague!) Way better than the material deserved.
I will be honest. I didn’t know about this film being in production and blindly assumed that was a screenshot from The Crown. Guess Dianas popular again.
That description… maybe it’s just the proximity of the word “hunting” to the last sentence, but it makes me thing Diana’s going to be going all Predator on everyone in attendance.Which would be a lot more interesting than whatever the actual plot is, I’m guessing…
I would kinda enjoy that. She’s gonna take down the entire Royal Family! With an obligatory fist fight with the Queen on top of Buckingham Palace!
As cinematically breathtaking as that Buckingham Palace rooftop fight was, it did open some confusing plot holes. For one, Sandringham Estate is in Norfolk, 100 miles from the palace; are supposed to believe that a teleporter that’s never beamed anyone more than a league through the entire film can suddenly transport two grown women 30 times that distance with pinpoint accuracy?
The formatting on the comments for this article seems off and is merging two replies to two separate comments. So first, if this is a stealth reboot of Ready or Not with Diana in the Samara Weaving part then count me in. Separately, getting this ready for the end of this year seems rushed to me. But then I realised that it makes sense to get this out before the next season of The Crown (presumably at the end of 2022) covers the same timeline and makes this film a little obsolete.
Spencer. Directed by Pablo LarraínSpencer, you say?
Yes. Except he’s for hire.
Ha! Those were my two thoughts: Frank Spencer then Spencer for Hire, in that order …
And then the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion.
They are rebooting the Equalizer with a female lead – I’d watch the hell out of Diana faking her death, becoming a private detective, moving to Boston and teaming up with Hawk (played by OITNB’s Danielle Brooks).
I am weirdly into this idea.
If this isn’t the weekend in question, then who the hell cares:
I assume this is set on the weekend with Lord Byron and Percy Shelley on Lake Geneva, during which, inspired by a vivid nightmare, she first conceives of the story for Frankenstein?
“We all knew Kristen Stewart was going to be incredible as Princess Diana, and yet somehow we have managed to be absolutely floored by this first look at the actress in Spencer.”
Man I wish I was innocent enough to be absolutely floored by Kristen Stewart in Princess Di cosplay.When did the AV Club become Entertainment Tonight?
They are two PR articles away from posting about celebrity birthdays.
Their interviews have already reached that level:AVClub: Everyone knows you are awesome. That’s such a power move! Tell us what it is like!
My main concern is how she is going to keep her eyelids fully open for long stretches of scenes. I’m even surprised at this picture.
The crew had a lot of trouble with that until someone hit on the brilliant idea of applying the gaffer’s tape first and then the makeup.
And her fucking mouth shut. Di wasn’t a mouth breather
Even The Mary Sue would’ve bounced this piece for being too cheery.
Vacant eyes and a bad wig….NOT Princess Diana
No. You are FLOORED by her, and you KNEW she was going to be incredible. Everyone did. These are facts.
‘Tom Hanks? That guy from He Knows You’re Alone? C’mon, on the basis of that alone, we all know he’s a garbage actor’
Well, they definitely cast an actress as divisive as the late Princess Diana was.
She may well be great, but all you can tell from that photo is that she can look up while tilting her head, and even I can do that.
Oh I don’t know…
Stewart looks great, quite unexpectedly. Looking forward to this. (I think writers way too often misuse the word “iconic.” How could the movie “Jackie” be iconic when barely anybody saw it?! Not only that, but it was “instantly iconic!” Wow! This is the first reference I’ve seen to that instantly iconic movie in the past 36 months. Go figure.)
I think Ms. Stewart is brilliant in challenging roles. But the tone of this piece is way too breathless superfan hyperbolic, like it was written by her PR team. “Jackie” was “ic0nic”, seriously? If ever a movie screamed “overstylized, silly C+ that no one will remember in 5 years”…
I knew she was going to be incredible as Princess Diana because of that Totino’s pizza rolls commercial.