Harnessing a Fluid

“I’m not the typical showman,” she adds, curling her feet up under her legs and reaching for another cigarette. “But at the same time, I want so badly to expose myself. I want to be understood and I want to be seen, and I want to do that in the rawest, purest, most naked way I can.”

An increasingly compelling and nuanced performer, Stewart describes the process at different times as “harnessing a fluid,” “tapping into a magic world” and “finding a portal.” It is, for her, an “explorative, meditative, moving, beautiful, transcendent experience that brings us all closer.”

During production, Stewart worked 18-hour days, six days a week, and when she wasn’t filming she was promoting her partnership with Chanel. “As a younger person, I would have lost steam: ‘I’m tired. I don’t feel good. I’m sick.’ Instead I tried to make myself more sick, more tired, just to see if there ever was a breaking point, and there wasn’t.”

Stewart has always had what she refers to as “high-functioning adrenal glands,” only now, it seems that she’s figured out a way to channel her anxiety productively, to enjoy the process of acting rather than simply enduring its trappings. When she notices me glancing at a leather-bound journal between us on the coffee table, she opens it to reveal poems she’s written over the years, mostly while flying. If she’s happy with how a poem has turned out, she transcribes it into the journal.

“Come,” she says, leading me upstairs to a cluttered garage. The disarray makes it feel like the most intimate room in the house. A canvas, painted almost entirely in black, rests against one wall. At the center is a man in repose, halfway between sleep and consciousness, surrounded by dark. Before I can react, she says, “Yeah, I mean, I’m not, like, good. It just feels nice to apply paint to something.”

Stewart is making a short film inspired by the image, which in turn evolved from one of her poems. “It’s basically about that moment when you wake up and you get dressed and you realize” — she slips into first person — “I’m not sad anymore. I’m not saturated anymore. I’ve been dropped back into everyone else’s reality and now I can live again.”

source