Kristen Stewart says that in no uncertain terms, she was told that if she wanted to land a Marvel movie, she needed to downplay her homosexuality. In an interview with Harper’s Bazaar, she revealed:
“I have fully been told, ‘If you just like do yourself a favor, and don’t go out holding your girlfriend’s hand in public, you might get a Marvel movie.’”
She elaborated in a more recent interview with Variety:
“That’s been a conversation that’s always existed. I’ve always radically rejected it. It’s nice to be able to talk about that in a way that people really understand now. Instead of sounding like I’m being crazy, like, ‘Don’t put me in a box! Ambiguity’s a cool thing!’ Now, it’s like, duh. Before I had to say it like it was some far out idea. Now it’s more on the main stage, which is rad.”
It’s not as though she is targeting Marvel specifically. As she clarified, she simply used that hit-maker as an example: “It was literally just a big conglomerate-y type thing.” As she quipped:
“I’m sure they would love to hire the gay kids to be superheroes.”
In her new film, Amazon’s ‘Seberg’, she co-stars with Anthony Mackie. When Variety asked what superhero Stewart should play, she declared:
“A gay one!”
Mackie discussed his work playing Sam Wilson, a.k.a. The Falcon, soon to be the new Captain America (maybe) in the Marvel movies. Mackie stated, “It’s been a really wonderful, eye-opening experience to where I’ve been able to work with many —” Stewart completed his thought, “Gay kids.”
Thanks to the success of ‘Black Panther’, which featured a largely black cast including its titular hero, Marvel Studios (a subsidiary of Disney) has been emboldened. They followed that $1 billion hit with another, ‘Captain Marvel’, featuring a female protagonist. While it is rumored that gay references were cut from ‘Thor: Ragnarok’ and ‘Black Panther’, Tessa Thompson’s ‘Ragnarok’ character, Valkyrie, will be openly gay in 2021’s ‘Thor: Love and Thunder’, and a gay male hero will be included in next year’s ‘Eternals’.
Stewart famously dated her male ‘Twilight’ co-star Robert Pattinson, before she was caught publically cheating on him with her (also male) married director Rupert Sanders. However, since then she has only dated women, and while hosting ‘SNL’ in 2017, she declared, “I’m super gay.”
And it appears that her crime-fighting character in the upcoming ‘Charlie’s Angels’ reboot from Sony will be gay as well.
Either way, it doesn’t seem as though Stewart is dying to star in a Marvel movie, but if she does, she just wants one that represents who she really is as a person at this point in time. But if I may, Marvel… Phyla-Vell?
