Kristen Stewart and Garrett Hedlund are in the middle of a game of
Q&A chicken. They’re sitting in a courtyard at the Beverly Hills
Four Seasons on a hot November morning, staring at each other over a
small table, waiting for the other one to crack first and answer my
question. The only movement comes from the smoke wafting off his
cigarette and the slowly forming half-smile on each of their faces.
All I’ve done to provoke this battle of wills is to ask, “Which of you
is most like your character in On the Road?” In the new film adaptation
of the classic Jack Kerouac–penned road trip novel (which opens today in
limited release), Hedlund plays the charismatic bohemian Dean Moriarty,
and Stewart is cast as Dean’s carnal free spirit of a girlfriend,
Marylou. Neither actor wants to brag that he or she closely resembles an
iconic literary character, so it becomes obvious to both that a round
of mutual compliments is the only way out of this question. But who will
be brave enough to suck it up and go first?
“He’s got a lot of Dean in him,” Stewart finally says.
“He’s got a lot of teeth in him?” Hedlund replies, in mock-confusion.
“Dean!” she insists, as they both start laughing. It isn’t hard
to coax a smile from Stewart and Hedlund, even if their screen personas
would suggest otherwise. Both are best known for their straightforward,
sullen work in big-bucks franchise roles — she in Twilight, he in Tron
Legacy — and you can see what drew them to On the Road, a film populated
not by computer programs but flesh-and-blood people, where the
characters aren’t undead but instead, really living.
In truth, Hedlund and Stewart are both closer to their roles than they’d
readily admit. Like Neal Cassady, the Beat figure who Dean is based on,
Hedlund grew up in the heartland, spending his childhood on a farm so
remote that you have to fly into Fargo and drive three hours away to
find it. To win the part in On the Road, Hedlund channeled the vibe of
the novel and wrote several soul-baring pages about his own life,
offering them to director Walter Salles after his first audition by
asking, sincerely, “Can I read you something I wrote?” It worked.
As for Stewart, “You wouldn’t be attracted to a project if you had to fake it,” she says. Though Marylou is more impetuous and sexually assertive than the other roles she’s played, Stewart claims, “I
don’t feel like I’m stepping outside of myself when I’m playing parts.
Even if it’s really different from the apparent version of who I am, I’m
always somewhere deep in there.”
It isn’t jarring to go from green-screen blockbuster work like Snow
White and the Huntsman to something this intimate and sweaty? Again,
Stewart half-smiles; she's spent most of her career alternating
juggernaut Twilight films with barely budgeted indies like The Runaways
and Welcome to the Rileys. “I don’t mind making big movies, ‘cause
you get to sort of bitch and complain with the other actors about what’s
keeping you from being able to really feel it,” she says with a self-deprecating chuckle. “But
then at the end of the day, you could be in a white room; the whole
thing about being an actor is you have to have an imagination.”
A lack of inhibition helps, too. In On the Road, Hedlund plays a cool
character full of Beat bravado, but he’s still asked to do things that
might make other young actors flinch, like shedding his clothes, dancing
with wild abandon in long unbroken takes, or simulating rough sex with
Steve Buscemi. Ask him about finding the freedom to go to those places,
and Hedlund surprises by daring to quote not a venerated literary icon
like Kerouac but Ethan Hawke, whose book Ash Wednesday, he says, made a
big impression on him as a teenager.
“‘The only thing in life worth learning is humility,’” quotes Hedlund, who vaguely resembles Hawke with his brown goatee and earnest literary bent. “‘Shatter the ego, then dance through the perfect contradiction of life and death.’” His explanation: “It
encourages you not to walk with your head down and your hands in your
pockets and be closed off to life, but to be open and nonjudgmental and
accessible to experience a lot of wonderful journeys within this short
life of ours.”
Do those inhibitions come down permanently after simulating the
envelope-pushing sex scenes of On the Road? Stewart says yes and
acknowledges that in general, she's perceived to be a closed-off person,
but that she's working on it. “It’s funny: By putting up walls, you think you’re protecting yourself, but you get to live less,” says Stewart. “If
you’re hiding behind a wall, then you can’t see over it. You’re
depriving yourself of so much if you’re trying to be too aware of what
you’re putting out there, you know?”
She adds, “If you feel someone breaking those walls down, let them.
Those are the people that you need to find in life, rather than people
that you’re just comfortable with.”
With that in mind, it's no wonder that Hedlund and Stewart want to end
our conversation by discussing Just Kids, Patti Smith's book about her
artistically enriching and culture-defining friendship with artist
Robert Mapplethorpe. “It had a very similar effect on me as reading On the Road did when I was fifteen,” says Stewart, who's currently reading the novel for a second time. “I had a serious urge to create shit after I read it, to go out and find people, and travel.”
When I bring up the recent report that Smith is a fan of Stewart's —
suggesting that maybe one day, she could find herself starring in
another adaptation of a bohemian coming-of-age book — Stewart demurs and
meets eyes with Hedlund again. “I will never be the type of person like Patti Smith who has that compulsion to be constantly creating,” she laughs, confessing, “You
feel diminished somehow [after reading it]! You’re like, ‘God! I gotta
build myself back up again! I need to actually use every second! Why am I
sitting around, ever?’"
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