To play Princess Diana, Kristen Stewart embraced an unaccustomed level of preparation, including months with a dialect coach, achieving a performance that has critics and fans raving

Since the premiere of “Spencer” this September, critics have fallen in love with Kristen Stewart’s portrayal of Princess Diana. The response is an affirmation of Chilean director Pablo Larraín’s absolute conviction that only Stewart was right for the role; a belief so strong he decided not to hold auditions.

“He was so confident and so serious, it was chilling,” recalls Stewart of the first time she spoke with Larraín. “I was like, ‘Who am I to tell you you’re wrong?’ And the way that he described it was exciting. It was genuinely jumping into an unknown.”

Larraín recalls Stewart being “completely fearless” on that introductory call, a conversation that convinced him there was no one else who could portray his Diana. “I needed her as much as she needed to play the character,” says Larraín. “She not only understood the character really well, she also brought something that I think is very hard to see in cinema today — an old-school type of performing: extremely focused, extremely generous, extremely defined and very grounded.”

by: Carita Rizzo

Where the 31-year-old Angeleno may have lacked a cultural connection to the British royal, her sphinx-like quality in the face of extreme public interest made Stewart the perfect person to embody a figure both loved and scrutinized by millions. Stewart’s ability to disappear into her characters, be they real-life icons or fictitious soul-searchers, only served as further confirmation she would rise to a challenge of this magnitude.

Kristen Stewart found that Princess Diana could be very different depending on the situation, which made her true inner self seem elusive.

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Though Stewart’s lack of hesitation in taking Larraín up on his offer may have exuded fearlessness, the closer she got to principal photography, the more daunting the role started to feel. “I was scared, to say the least,” confesses Stewart, who explains how she lived and breathed Diana for months, immersing herself in every bit of material she could find. “There wasn’t a morning that I woke up or [a night that I] went to sleep without thinking, ‘I have to actually do that.’ Theoretically, that’s a very cool idea, but one day it’s going to be the first day. It’s a lot. She’s a lot.”

It wasn’t just nailing Diana’s posture, gestures and diction that posed a challenge: there was the matter of getting to the root of her elusive persona.

“She’s different all the time; the way she speaks to her kids, the way she speaks to a person doing an interview,” says Stewart, adding that, although the film takes place over three days, the intention was always to suggest a greater scope of a life.

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Self-confessed to being rehearsal-averse — accustomed to discovering her character’s motivation once the camera starts rolling — Stewart realized she couldn’t achieve this performance without preparation, and spent four months with dialect coach William Conacher building Diana from the outside in. “I’ve never had to do such particular physical work, ever,” says Stewart, who had to let go of her own self-consciousness and let others inside her process. “I had Pablo’s and William’s eyes, as well as my own, on the physical parts of it. I was very open with everyone, like, ‘Honestly, tell me anything. Let’s try everything. I’m open. Let’s figure out our version of Diana together.’ And in between those moments, you have to just live and breathe and forget that you’re trying to be someone else, because this person has to feel alive.”

Stewart’s immersion in the character, from idiosyncrasies to internal struggle, was what sold co-star Timothy Spall on her performance from the moment they set foot on set. “As an actor, there are many ways you can approach a part. One way is doing an impersonation — and it can be an extremely clever impersonation — but there’s another way, which is an embodiment, where it fuses with you and you don’t see the creases,” says Spall. “That’s what I think she does so brilliantly in this: It’s a fusion. It’s a total embodiment.”

It is, however, an approach that comes at a toll. Stewart describes her portrayal of Diana’s mental breakdown as the most loaded, layered, intense, extreme experience she’s ever had, calling the shoot a “three-month mad dash.”

“It was exhausting, lonely, scary and cold. I never stopped running,” she says. “But it’s one of those experiences where the more tired I got, the more encouraged I was. I was so enlivened by the pummeling I was receiving and being able to be like, ‘Yeah, watch this. I’m going to get back up stronger every day.’ The hardest part [about making this film] was the best part of it, because I felt so alive as that character that I just really wanted to fight for her.”

While the film underscores the seclusion of Diana, making the audience feel like they are privy to something secret, that level of intimacy, says Stewart, is a testament to the intense collaboration between Larraín, director of photography Claire Mathon and herself. “Every single day I would be shocked at [Claire’s] intuitive anticipation of what I would do next, because I didn’t even know what I was going to do next. We really did find a synchronicity just because we were so close to each other. We were breathing the same air,” she says. The results speak for themselves: “I felt like the camera was completely inside me, which never happens,” says Stewart. “It’s so rare to work with people just letting you actually be the best you can be.”

For Stewart, the experience was singular and transformative, setting new parameters for the kind of actor she wants to be. “From a personal perspective, [this film] just raised the bar,” she says. “Take the results out of it completely, that is the way that I want to spend my time, just trying to jump higher.”

That the efforts of her labor are being met with critical acclaim comes as no surprise, least of all to those who watched her become Diana. “This is sophisticated character acting at its most seamless,” says Spall. “As she revealed herself, I thought, this is a moment where people are going, ‘Oh, my God, I knew she was good, but I didn’t know she was that good.’” ✤

DP Mathon Built Trust With Star to Capture Intimate Nuances

by: Karen Idelson

Mathon followed the actor with short focal length lenses to ramp up the feel­ings of intimacy on the one hand, and entrapment and fear on the other. She also referenced the frenetic jazz-inspired soundtrack in terms of pacing to mirror Diana’s anxiety.

With the director of photography so close, Stewart had the sensation the camera was recording every nuance of her work, and that this version of Diana would be wholly captured on the 16 mm film the film­makers chose for the project. For Mathon, this was the entire point. Even though she wanted Stewart and Larraín to feel they could work as freely as possible, she knew the only way to shoot this upside-down fable was to stay with Stewart at all times.

And Stewart loved Mathon’s methods.

“[Mathon] is somebody who opens herself to experience and that’s a remarkable quality for a DP to have,” says Stewart. “There was nothing [Mathon and Larraín] did not see. [The film] was entirely from my character’s perspective.” ✤

On the set of “Spencer,” cinematographer Claire Mathon stood closer to Kristen Stewart than she ever had to an actor on a film set.

It was the only place for the cinematographer to be. Director Pablo Larraín wanted Stewart tightly framed so the audience would feel the same claustrophobia and dread as his version of Princess Diana.

Positioned so close to Stewart at her most vulnerable moments, the French cinematographer also fashioned a kind of safe space to capture Stewart’s enigmatic performance as a doomed princess in a dark fairy tale.

“That was something we managed to find, the two of us, me and Kristen together,” says Mathon. “It was a lot about confidence and establishing trust in each other, but there was also the matter of complicity.”