Kristen Stewart is showing a more vulnerable side of herself.
The 29-year-old actress covers Vanity Fair's September Style Issue and opens up to the magazine about starring in the highly anticipated Charlie's Angels reboot, as well as her unconventional career choices after being thrust into A-list status due to her starring role in the Twilight series. Instead of working on blockbuster films, Stewart chose to work with independent directors like Kelly Reichardt and Olivier Assayas on smaller projects, and explains why.
"It gave me a chance to not weigh something down," she says. "It was so much bigger than me. My baggage was so minuscule in comparison to what [Reichardt’s and Assayas’s] story lines are, as filmmakers. I was finally given a chance to be looked at, not as this thing in this celebrity-obsessed culture that was like, 'Oh, that's the girl from Twilight.'"
Stewart says her personality was misunderstood during the height of her Twilight fame because she wasn't chasing fame.
"I think I've grown out of this, but I used to be really frustrated that because I didn't leap willingly into being at the center of a certain amount of attention, that it seemed like I was an a**hole," she admits. "I am in no way rebellious. I am in no way contrarian. I just want people to like me."
These days, the actress is as tight-lipped as ever about her private life, though the magazine notes that her on-again and off-again girlfriend, model Stella Maxwell, accompanied her to the photo shoot.
"I only date people who complement me," Stewart says simply about her love life.
The actress is often described as intense and passionate by the people she has worked with, and is clearly sensitive and deeply affected by her surroundings. Later, she's asked about starring in the 2016 supernatural psychological thriller Personal Shopper, and she says she believes in ghosts.
"I talk to them," she says. "If I'm in a weird, small town, making a movie, and I'm in a strange apartment, I will literally be like, 'No, please, I cannot deal. Anyone else, but it cannot be me.'"
"Who knows what ghosts are, but there is an energy that I’m really sensitive to," she continues. "Not just with ghosts, but with people. People stain rooms all the time."
Last month, ET got the first look of the Charlie's Angels reboot directed by Elizabeth Banks, which also stars Naomi Scott, Ella Balinska and Noah Centineo.
"I'm really excited for the world to meet the new Angels," Banks told ET during a visit to the Istanbul set. "We built this project on the shoulders of the amazing legacy of Charlie's Angels, the TV show [and] the movies in the 2000s. We wanted to honor the original incarnations over the years and, like all great feminists, stand on the shoulders of what came before us."
"Admittedly, I've never seen the TV show. I loved the movies growing up," Stewart added. "This one, really, it lives in the same world. All of the previous Angels laid the foundation for us to exist."