(Credit: A24 / HBO)
Sat 6 December 2025 15:44, UK
Kristen Stewart has revealed the one Greta Gerwig movie she “loves”, which made her “stream-cry”.
In a recent conversation with the New York Times, the Twilight actor praised the 2023 live-action movie, Barbie.
“I think for a woman to be allowed to make a movie of that scale and how physical it was — Greta Gerwig made a world to live in, and then she totally took Barbie and broke her into a million pieces,” Stewart said.
In the movie, Margot Robbie stars as the famous children’s toy, who faces off against the Mattel CEO and his male subordinates, escaping their clutches back to Barbieland in a feel-good epic punctuated by plenty of famous faces.
Nodding to this plotline, Stewart continued, “The villains were the Mattel executives! I’m surprised that Mattel let her make that movie. I thought it was so critical of the entire notion of being put into our little boxes.”
When the interviewer expressed her qualms with the “take-away” of the movie being, ostensibly, that “Barbie dolls are cool”, thereby still being an advertisement of the thing it is critiquing, Stewart agreed. “I hear you,” she said.
She continued, “You see a big poster that Margot Robbie’s on and you’re like, Oh my God, that is the picture of beauty. That is perpetuating for sure. It’s complicated, because I completely understand what you’re saying but when I watched the movie, I was stream-crying.”
Stewart went on, “Just the fact that she was allowed to do it, the fact she was able to make jokes about Proust in a movie about Barbie, and then Weird Barbie. I love the fact of it. But I hear you.”
In the same interview, the Love Lies Bleeding actor hit out at the entertainment industry, bemoaning the difficulties of existing as a marginalised person trying to create art.
Eloquently, she stated, “Having it be so impossible for people to tell stories is capitalist hell, and it hates women and marginalised voices, and it’s racist. It’s too hard to make movies right now that aren’t blockbuster-y, proven equations.”
Stewart’s new movie and directorial debut, The Chronology of Water, will be released in theatres this February.
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