Kristen Stewart grew up without films on queer female love. Now she’s the lead in a ‘gay Christmas movie’
Kristen Stewart and Mackenzie Davis star as a lesbian couple in Happiest Season. (TriStar)
Kristen Stewart has described Happiest Seasons, the upcoming “gay Christmas movie” she’s set to star in, as a “huge exhale” to her and many other queer women.
Festive flicks have long been painfully heterosexual – saccharine stories of a big realisation, the city slicker finding love in his small-town home, flash-mob proposals in shopping malls.
But this holiday season will be different, with a stocking of queer Christmas love stories, from Hallmark to Lifetime to Paramount, all dropping this year.
Speaking to The Guardian’s G2, Stewart said of Happiest Seasons: “It’s a gay Christmas movie and I know that’s an annoying thing to label it right off the bat, but, for me, that is extremely attractive, and sounds like… a huge exhale.”
Kristen Stewart says it ‘feels good’ starring in a film about queer love.
The eagerly-anticipated movie focuses on a young woman, Abby (Kristen Stewart), who plans to propose to her girlfriend Harper (Mackenzie Davis) while attending her annual family holiday celebration – where she finds out that her girlfriend is not yet out to her conservative parents.
Such a film about the love between two queer women was inconceivable to Stewart when she was younger, who reflected that movie with “two female leads at the centre of a love story” was non-existence growing up.
Not only having the chance to watch such a film but to star in it, too, “feels good”, she said. “I didn’t grow up with a movie that had such expansive ambition, that had two female leads at the centre of a love story, and not in this format.
“Not to say there hasn’t been great queer content made over the years that has been really beautiful, and really important touchstones.
“But at the same time, it’s not something that I grew up with, and I would have loved to.”
She also joked that when discussing who would play Abby’s partner with director Clea DuVall, there was “absolutely no one else” apart from Black Mirror‘s Mackenzie.
Stewart stressed how important she felt it was that the pair’s on-screen chemistry be “cool, comfortable [..] and never forced.”
