Every great magazine profile needs its distinctive scene—Hemingway barging through Abercrombie & Fitch, Ricky Jay in the bar of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Chicago, Channing Tatum in the desert. In Emily Witt’s deeply insightful Profile of the actress Kristen Stewart from this week’s issue, it’s a driving range in Los Angeles, where we learn, among other surprising things, that Stewart is a golfer. “I haven’t really figured out my golf look,” she tells Witt, who notes that few people since James Dean have looked more at home than Stewart does in a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. Stewart has been acting since she was a kid, and became very, very famous at the age of eighteen, with the release of “Twilight,” the first in a series about vampires and werewolves living in the Pacific Northwest. Her role in those movies introduced the wider world to what Witt identifies as Stewart’s “naturalism and restraint, qualities of her acting that some find captivating and others inscrutable.” Stewart’s fellow-actors also note the tension inherent in her performances; as Jodie Foster, another child star whose style has evolved throughout her life, explained, “She shows onscreen how she struggles with demonstrating emotion.” Witt follows Stewart as she goes through the early paces of an Oscar campaign, in support of her role as Diana, in Pablo Larraín’s “Spencer”—and explores how a creature of California (with a locution full of f-bombs and “dudes”) came to embody another very, very famous woman, the Princess of Wales. —Ian Crouch, newsletter editor Read “How Kristen Stewart Became Her Generation’s Most Interesting Movie Star.” | | | |
|  Photograph by Macall Polay / HBO - “We love you.” “You two look fucking amazing.” “Why can’t we all be in the same room?” The stars of Maggie Gyllenhaal’s “The Lost Daughter” (based on the Elena Ferrante novel)—Olivia Colman, Dakota Johnson, and Jessie Buckley—gab with the director on Zoom.
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| P.S. The novelist Chinua Achebe was born on this day in 1930. As Ruth Franklin writes, of the Nigerian author, who died in 2013, “with his masterpiece, ‘Things Fall Apart,’ . . . Achebe began the literary reclamation of his country’s history from generations of colonial writers.” | | | |
Today’s newsletter was written by Ian Crouch. | | | |
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