Looking ahead

In a vast downstairs ballroom in the Shangri-La Hotel in Paris, I can hear Kristen Stewart before I see her, changing behind a patterned screen in a far corner. Her voice is distinctive — that easy, low-rolling California accent, where all the words run together, and she sounds like nothing could surprise her.

When she finally emerges to go to have her picture taken on a balcony with the Eiffel Tower rising up behind her, she is in perfect contrast to her delicate, gilded surroundings. Her hair is a black-blonde swipe across her forehead and she’s wearing floor-length black velvet, a black bow at her throat, as befits her status as a Chanel ambassador. She walks past, a bold, swaggering walk, and smiles. “Yeah,” she says, seeing my face. “It’s intense. It’s a lot of look.”

Soon enough, she’s back and changed. Ripped jeans, white T-shirt, bare feet: her more natural state. We talk on a warm terrace, cross-legged on sofas. I don’t know why I expected her to be reticent or shy, but probably because that is how she is always assumed to be, or how she comes across in photographs, when her expression sometimes seems years as the permanently tortured, lovesick Bella Swan. “I try to avoid the word ‘awkward’,” Stewart says, remembering that time. “I want to reclaim that word, because it’s been used too violently against me.”