Kristen Stewart enjoyed working with an intimacy coordinator on her new movie Love Lies Bleeding, she credits the position with eliminating the “free-for-all” kind of sex scenes she encountered in her earlier films.
The 33-year-old actress stars with Katy O’Brian, 35, in the romantic crime thriller directed by Rose Glass. The film has received positive reviews since its January premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, with critics highlighting the pair’s electric chemistry. While Stewart has said her sex scenes with O’Brian will shock people, she credits their intimacy coordinator with helping the scenes look real and “hot.”
In Love Lies Bleeding, Stewart portrays Lou, a gym manager who falls in love with Jackie, a bodybuilder who is passing through town. The two have multiple intimate scenes that will have people talking. While the role of an intimacy coordinator can be controversial in Hollywood, O’Brian finds it enjoyable to work with one.
“It felt free,” she tells. “I know people are like, ‘Oh, it just hinders what you can do’ and didn’t.”
“No, I was into it,” adds Stewart. “It’s almost like having a nice open conversation about like what you all want and then, so you can have really good sex.”
While filming sex scenes, Stewart hasn’t always experienced that.
“I’ve always just been sort of thrown into [sex scenes],” Stewart adding that she was not very familiar with the role an intimacy coordinator played on set before this film.
“Every scene usually is just — they begin kissing, maybe someone says something, they fall down, they begin to make love. And then you’re like, cool so it’s just a free-for-all, huh? Like, no one knows where anything’s going? We didn’t do it like that at all,” she says. “There’s a precision to the scene, there’s a real power play dynamic thing happening, and so in order for that to really land and not us just being self-conscious face-smushers, it was directed pretty finitely.”
According to SAG-AFTRA, an intimacy coordinator “is an advocate, a liaison between actors and production, and a movement coach and/or choreographer in regards to nudity and simulated sex and other intimate and hyper-exposed scenes.”
Stewart says she’s lucky to be at the stage in her career where she can make the movies she wants, not the ones she has to make.
“I read the script and just thought it was really bold, and scary, and funny, and hot and a movie that felt like from a different time,” she says.
Despite its setting in the ’80s, Love Lies Bleeding had a queer story that resonated with her.
“In the ’80s, there was an audaciousness and like a sort of lack of fear. I don’t know, not lack of fear, just sort of an intensity that we’ve lost a bit. Like our edges have been dulled a bit in trying to be more considerate and nice to each other — which I am all about. But also we are monsters because we’re humans,” she says. “It’s important to not make movies about, especially queer people, that are strictly just sort of just teaching lessons and trying to be good all around, moral compass people. So I was like this is good, this is fun.”
Stewart has publicly come out on Saturday Night Live in 2017 and has taken it upon himself to be a role model for many LBGTQ individuals.
“I didn’t even know what the movie was going to be,” she says. “I was just like, I think this filmmaker is someone to support and that’s why I did.”
It’s a challenge to get a movie off the ground. Ask Kristen Stewart.
Her directorial debut, “The Chronology of Water,” has been stuck in development hell, struggling to find financing – to the point she took a stand in January, telling Variety she would not make another movie before she had made hers.
While the industry weighs this threat, audiences can enjoy Stewart’s upcoming performances in “Love Me” and “Love Lies Bleeding” – two very different stories in which Stewart’s characters fall head over heels and makes questionable choices to keep romances alive.
The latter, a pulpy slice of Americana written and directed by Brit Rose Glass, enters theaters in the US this month and sees Stewart take on the role of Lou, a gym manager smitten with aspiring bodybuilder Jackie (Katy M. O’Brian). The pair’s love affair is threatened when they become involved with Lou’s crime family, headed by grizzled Ed Harris, who runs their small town in 1980s New Mexico.
The thriller – think “Bonnie and Clyde” by way of the Coen Brothers – is both a throwback and a piece of forward-looking, muscular filmmaking; a queer love story with dirt under its fingernails that pulses with violent intent. The actor shared that working with Glass provided him with many takeaways, as well as another showcase for Stewart. “What did I learn from this?” she pondered. “Not everyone should keep (directing). She should.”
Stewart knows of what she speaks. A former child star who successfully led a mega-franchise before pivoting to auteur fare (and the odd blockbuster), Stewart has experience to burn and more than a few war stories from life in the trenches of modern-day moviemaking. She’s worked with David Cronenberg, Pablo Larraín, Olivier Assayas, Woody Allen and Kelly Reichardt, earned an Oscar nomination and won a César, the French equivalent – the first American actor to do so.
Glass was coming off her hit debut, ‘Saint Maud’, and only had Stewart in mind for Lou. “(‘Love Lies Bleeding’) was quite a big leap up in scale,” the director told in a joint interview with Stewart and O’Brian, “but I was met with a lot of encouragement, particularly for the more bonkers aspects of it.”
Her screenplay blends pitch black humor and sexual abandon with occasional gore and phantasmagoria, with a plot partly influenced by O’Brian’s bodybuilder’s steroids usage. Stewart was fully committed to the Albuquerque shoot in the summer of 2022. “I trust her choices, instincts, opinions, taste – all of it,” she said.
“I felt fully in her hands,” said Stewart. “I don’t always feel that way with directors. I think as an actor I’m becoming really annoying. I don’t trust everyone. So it was fun to fully trust fall with her.”
“There’s this delicacy and this open communication thing, that is really nice to see, that is – and not to be too binary about it – but is quite female,” she elaborated. And it was just fun to see her run such a wild experience, very much in control of something that was also out of control.
Her relationship with Glass is one she hopes to emulate one day.
If I were to take anything from this film, I would say to find people who really like you. You need to find people who really want to be able to give up their thoughts and bodies, she explained.
“I wanted to give her everything so she could just take it and do exactly what she wanted to do, and it then had nothing to do with what I wanted to do,” Stewart explained. “But somehow those instincts get married and a movie happens. And I just want to be on the other side of that.”
One thing Stewart’s crew shouldn’t expect if and when she finds herself in the hot seat is a lot of downtime. The conversation moves towards O’Brian comparing her experiences in the New Mexico desert with Marvel and Disney productions (the actor has had supporting roles in “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” and “The Mandalorian”).
“We have so much more time on a Marvel set,” said O’Brian, “you just…”
“…expire,” Stewart interjected.
“It’s more laid back,” O’Brian offered.
“It’s boring,” her co-star replied.
Stewart doesn’t like to be kept waiting. Film industry, take note.
‘Love Lies Bleeding’ opens in select US cinemas on March 8th, before going wide on March 15th, and is released in the UK on May 3.
