She’s always up for a challenge and Kristen Stewart had a marvelous time making “Still Alice” despite the emotional subject matter. In the flick, the “Twilight” actress plays a daughter helping her mother cope with early onset Alzheimer’s Disease, and Kristen drew on her own experience with a family friend who “was clearly in a severe state of dementia. She had clearly lost parts of herself and what remained was very desperate to connect.”
Stewart explained that the task seemed less daunting knowing that Julianne Moore would play her mother. “I also knew I could do it with [Moore] because I’ve known her for a couple years. I knew I could be her kid. I just knew that everything was going to be honest and right. We weren’t making anything up, so it would be heavy.”
Furthermore, Kristen felt a certain conviction from working on the project. “It gives you in the most basic sense a fundamental perspective. You want to go home and call your mom, or you want to stop being so petty. It gives you this massive jug of perspective.”
“The idea that that could happen to anyone – me, you, someone who you idolize, someone who is entirely in control all the time – it was not acting, it was so real. Anyone, even if you don’t have personal experience with the disease, you have a mom. I have a mom, so I know what that experience feels like. I understand what it would feel like to lose her.”
As for her acting philosophy, Stewart shared, “I don’t think I can ever step outside myself fully. It’s not the type of acting I want to do. I’ve been lucky enough to be allowed to do this. Everyone can tell me that I run my hand through my hair too much, and that’s fine because I’m truly there and very present in these moments.”
“With the roles I’ve been playing, especially recently in films like Sils Maria and Still Alice, the way to do those parts justice is to just really be them and to learn the things they’re learning. You got to walk in their shoes for real and experience what they experience. In that regard, I didn’t feel like I was playing characters. They were so there for me, I just wanted to live in them.”
