Kristen Stewart as Princess Diana?
That casting announcement seemed to come out of left field when it was announced last June, hand in hand with the news that someone—in this case, director Pablo Larraín—would be attempting his own take on the late Princess of Wales with Spencer, an effort that had so far proved to be a thankless task considering how well-versed the world is in Diana's life story.
Moreover, the project was announced when audiences were still anticipating the arrival of the fourth season of The Crown, which promised the addition of Lady Diana Spencer to the royal mix—the plot thickener that fans of the show had been really waiting for. As played by almost-newcomer Emma Corrin, graduate of a few Pennyworth episodes and a spot of British TV, who knew what to expect aside from wide eyes and a feathered haircut that otherwise never existed in nature except on Diana herself?
The introduction of Diana and Prince Charles' fractured fairytale inevitably got all the headlines when the award-winning series returned in November. Even the British government, for the first time since The Crown's premiere in 2016, suggested that Netflix add a disclaimer emphasizing that the drama is fiction, the sequence of events that culminated in the Prince and Princess of Wales' separation in 1992, followed by the tragedy of her death in 1996, still a sensitive matter for all who were involved.
Corrin, praised for nailing Diana's mannerisms, and Josh O'Connor, who both humanized Charles and effectively channeled his stiff upper lip, won Golden Globes for their one-and-done spins at the center of the intrigue. Elizabeth Debicki and Dominic West will be taking over as slightly older versions of the estranged couple for season five.
So with all that going on, plus the memory of the real Diana still looming so large, 23 years after her death, as her grown sons make their way in the world with their own families...
Really? Kristen Stewart as Princess Diana?
"To do this well, you need something very important in film, which is mystery," Larraín told Deadline when the casting was announced. "Kristen can be many things, and she can be very mysterious and very fragile and ultimately very strong as well, which is what we need. The combination of those elements made me think of her. The way she responded to the script and how she is approaching the character, it's very beautiful to see. I think she's going to do something stunning and intriguing at the same time. She is this force of nature."
It does make sense—and is making more sense with every photo taken of Stewart on the set of Spencer, a resemblance that was never on anybody's radar now startlingly uncanny (with a major assist from that instantly recognizable hairdo, a wig worth its weight in gold).
That being said, if anyone's going to finally be able to do less of an impersonation and more of an interpretation, it's the veteran star from Los Angeles, who's been in the business since she was about 9 years old and has seen a few things. And to date, the first-ever American actress to play Diana is also the only one who has experienced the sort of paparazzi mob that never left the princess alone—thanks to Stewart's participation in a cherished institution that overlapped with a romance fans couldn't get enough of.
Ironically, though he quickly tried to change the subject, Robert Pattinson once compared the mass fascination with his and Stewart's relationship (especially the end of it) to the obsession with Britain's royal family.
"I think it's because America really wants to have a royal family," the English actor suggested in 2012 during a "Times Talk Presents" event in New York. "You want to have a democratic royal family. It's a meritocratic version of it, sort of...actually, no, it's not it at all."
To which the late media critic David Carr, who was conducting the interview, offered, "So if you and [Kristen] have trouble, it's like Charles and Di having trouble."
People booed. "I wasn't really going there, just so you know!" Carr insisted.
"I would have been very happy just working from job to job, paying my rent one movie at a time," Stewart said on Conan, also in 2012. "I never wanted to be this famous. I never imagined this life for myself." In 2019, talking to Howard Stern, she called the paparazzi "thieves" who've been following her around since she was a teenager.
In her remarkable, still-discussed sit-down with the BBC's Panorama in 1995, Diana said she always knew being photographed getting out of the car at an event would be part of the job, but "it's now when I go out of my door, my front door, I'm being photographed."
"I never know where a lens is going to be," she continued. "A normal day would be followed by four cars. A normal day would come back to my car and find six freelance photographers jumping around me."
Stewart, going by everything she's had to say about the surreality of celebrity and the discomfort she experienced existing in a fishbowl when Twilight took off like wildfire, doesn't necessarily seem like one who'd want to contribute to the competing narratives about an extremely famous individual who was hounded right up until her death. But the opportunity to highlight the humanity of the very-real person who went through all that is actually right up her alley.
In fact, she took on a similar task portraying Jean Seberg in 2019's Seberg, director Benedict Andrews' film (streaming on Amazon) about the iconic New Wave actress. The Breathless star's reputation was basically destroyed by the FBI in retaliation for her political leanings, which included her support of the Black Panthers, and she was found dead in Paris at the age of 40 in 1979, the cause determined to be a probable suicide by barbiturate overdose.
Like most people, especially ones who weren't born yet at the time, Stewart only knew a fraction of Seberg's story.
"Well, I had this general perspective of her that coincided with the broad perspective, which is 'Chick from Breathless in the '60s, became a little eccentric, moved to Paris and never wanted to move back, drank herself to oblivion and ended her life,'" she told Awards Watch in December 2019. "It's just such an absurd plot line for what actually transpired in Jean's life and I think that her story is quite urgent, considering this subjugation of the truth and this maddening relationship we have with the truth in media and the idea that a woman who had a perspective which felt threatening to the government at large. She was sort of exiled illegally, not for breaking the law, but just for having an opinion that didn't coincide with theirs."
In addition to being excited to tell the late actress' story, Stewart continued, "I felt personally protective of her because she has this precious, tonal quality. As a performer, she's completely instinctive and present and available, and at the beginning had this buoyancy and this energy that felt undeniable and infectious.
"It felt naïve, but it felt very well intentioned and it felt honest. And then, as you watch her films progress, that light diminishes and now that I know more about the details of her actual life and what happened to her and her relationship with the FBI and the surveillance itself, it all makes sense. It wasn't indicative of her weakness, it was more that it was something that happened to her, a real offense to her. I felt really protective of who that person is."
Talking a year later about what drew her to the role of Princess Diana, Stewart felt a familiar instinct.
She was only 6 years old when Diana died in a car crash in August 1997, so she didn't exactly grow up knowing her as so many feel that they did, "but I remember the flowers," Stewart recalled on Jimmy Kimmel Live in November. "I remember being like, 'What are all of those? I've never seen so many in one place.'"
The actress was, of course, referring to the bouquets that blanketed the grounds outside Diana's home at Kensington Palace in the days following her death as seemingly all of the U.K. stopped to mourn. The images were transmitted far and wide, and more than 2 billion people around the world tuned in to watch her televised funeral, from Prince William and Prince Harry's somber walk behind her casket to the service at Westminster Abbey.
"I was really young, didn't really know what was going on. Now, it's hard not to feel protective over her. She was so young and obviously she comes out to here," Stewart—who's just turning 31 on April 9 and is playing Diana at 30—said, stretching her arms out wide. "Everyone's perspective is different and there's no way to get anything right because, like, what is fact in relation to personal experience?"
Akin to how Larraín's 2018 film Jackie, starring Natalie Portman in her Oscar-nominated turn as first lady Jacqueline Kennedy, focused on the short window between President Kennedy's assassination and his funeral, Spencer also covers just three days of Diana's life as she grapples with the reality of her failed marriage to Charles (played by Jack Farthing). Last week Stewart was seen filming with the young actors playing 9-year-old William and 7-year-old Harry in the film, which takes place in December 1991.
"It's this really poetic internal imagining of what that might have felt like, rather than giving, like, new information," Stewart explained, "so we kind of don't have a mark to hit. We just also love her."
Not that she wasn't doing her research. "I fall asleep with that in my head," she told Jimmy Kimmel when he asked if she'd been studying videos of the princess and listening to her voice. And he also couldn't not inquire about how they planned to achieve Diana's signature coif.
"She has very architectural hair, you know what I mean?" Stewart said. "So we're going to build it, and it's probably going to be different every day—and it gets deconstructed sometimes. We're going to have, like, reinforcements. I don't think I can do it solely with my own hair."
The other attributes she'll be bringing to the role, however, are all hers.
Not entirely unlike how Diana came into her own as the "People's Princess," carving out the right public role for herself despite the sorrows she was dealing with in her personal life by focusing on her natural strengths, Stewart has learned how to take the part of her job that she loves—the process of acting—and separate it from the part that she's never enjoyed at all.
"I guess the only thing that really was frightening, as a child, trying to interact with the public at large, was that [the fame] was just sort of confounding—the scope of that was just not something I could understand," she told Awards Watch in 2019. "And as soon as I realized that you can just toss that out the window and talk to yourself a little bit while you are trying to promote a movie, and realize, too, that it really doesn't f--king matter at all and what really matters is the work that you do, I was kind of able to almost look forward to falling on my face, because it's more interesting than packaging and delivering some bulls--t idea, you know what I mean?"
At the time, she referenced an upcoming role that was going to really challenge her, though she couldn't yet divulge what it was.
In fact, more than one thing she had coming up was "deeply unnerving," Stewart said, "but I don't want to do anything unless I feel that way, I just feel that there would be no reason. I want to look back on my life and imagine that all those moments were definitely used, at least with the intention of finding newness, some value in why it was scary."
As Diana said on Panorama of being the more palpably human arm of the royal family, "I see it as a possibly unique role, and yes, I've had difficulties, as everybody has witnessed over the years, but let's now use the knowledge I've gathered to help other people in distress."
Since she was going to have 60 photographers accompanying her on her travels anyway, she noted, she may as well do something important while the whole world was watching.
In the 2021 film Spencer, Kristen Stewart plays Princess Diana. The movie is set in 1991 and depicts one pivotal weekend from the late royal's life, during which she decides to end her marriage to Prince Charles following marital turmoil. Diana, mother of Prince William and Prince Harry, died in 1997 at age 36.
While filming in March 2021, Kristen recreated one of Princess Diana's memorable looks from school drop off.
The second official image of Kristen as Diana, released in March 2021.
Kristen films Spencer in Germany in February 2021.
Kristen films Spencer in Germany in February 2021.
Kristen films Spencer at Schloss Nordkirchen palace near Dortmund, Germany in January 2021.
Kristen films Spencer at Schlosshotel Kronberg, a former 19th-century royal palace, near Frankfurt, Germany in January 2021.
The first official image of Kristen as Diana, released in January 2021.