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Kristen Stewart's earlier 'Speak' role may help inform 'New Moon' performance
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As Bella Swan in the upcoming film, New Moon, based on the bestselling novel by Stephenie Meyer, actor Kristen Stewart must deal with a character that is so devastated by a break-up with her boyfriend, Edward Cullen, that she borders on suffering a mental breakdown. While the situation is very different for the character Stewart played in the movie, Speak, based on the award-winning bestseller by Laurie Halse Anderson, Ms. Stewart’s work on the character of Melinda Sordino five years ago may help inform her performance as Bella Swan in New Moon, currently wrapping up filming in Italy.
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Speak is about a teenage girl who suffers a trauma the summer before she enters high school. With her friends set against her based on her initial reaction to the trauma, Melinda resolves that perhaps it would be better to become a selective mute, not talking to any one any more than she has to as a way of coping with the stress of her experience. Ms. Anderson's novel was a National Book Award finalist and a School Library Journal Best Book of the Year. The book has been praised for the forthright and honest way it deals with its difficult subject matter. The novel was published in a 10th anniversary edition in 2009.
Performing the role of a selective mute, the lack of dialogue might seem like a challenge to any actor, but reviews of 14-year-old Kristen Stewart’s performance in Speak praised her skill at making Melinda believable to audiences.
Chris Parry of efilmcritic.com, for example, wrote in his review of the film: “As Melinda, Kristen Stewart doesn’t just shine, she burns. In a role where most of what she says doesn’t come in the form of words, the teen star of Panic Room and Cold Creek Manor shows that she’s far more than just a ‘teen actress,’ delivering a flawless performance.” Parry gave the film five out of five stars and said it was the best film he saw “by a long way” at the Sundance Film Festival of 2004.
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Though the traumas are completely different—Bella’s is based on a romance with a fantasy character, after all, whereas Melinda’s is very much a reality-based, physically and emotionally harmful experience—the characters do share some resemblance in the unhealthy ways they attempt to cope. Readers of both novels may see Ms. Stewart, now 19, pulling from some of the same set of skills in portraying Bella in the sequel to Twilight as she managed to deliver in bringing Melinda alive on screen at a much earlier age.
About her part in Speak, Ms. Stewart said in an interview in Ireland, that she realized for the first time while doing that film that, to her, acting “feels like breathing…like something that I have to do.”
The film, Speak, rated PG-13 for "mature thematic material," won the 2004 Audience Award at the Woodstock Film Festival.
While it makes sense that all actors' previous work experience adds to their ability to perform the next role, for Ms. Stewart, these two roles in particular seem to share a common emotional landscape that she will need to find, yet again, an effective and artistic way to traverse.
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