LOS ANGELES — Kristen Stewart is scrolling through her phone, looking for a song that made her cry. It's Valentine's Day. The sun is setting over Griffith Park, and we're sitting on a sofa at the house of a friend of a friend. This being Los Feliz, that friend is a DJ, and he has a couch rigged up with speakers inside the cushions. But we're not sitting on that couch, nor are we partaking in the weed growing around back, because, again, it's Valentine's Day, and as soon as we're done talking, Stewart wants to get home to her fiancee, screenwriter Dylan Meyer. They're staying in.
"We're kind of peopled out right now, so no fellow humans," Stewart says. She lands on the song "When I Was a Boy," a beautiful late-period Electric Light Orchestra ballad that Stewart kept in her back pocket in case she ever had to dive into some deep well of sadness while playing Princess Diana in "Spencer" and needed a little help getting there. Which happened, of course, when filmmaker Pablo Larraín asked her to do this big emotional scene where Diana returns to her childhood home and just starts sobbing and Stewart was too exhausted to wrap her head around it.
"Remember Pablo telling you that there's nothing better than a tired actor?" Stewart asks, recalling an earlier conversation we had with Larrain. She's not completely sold on that notion. But she kept this ELO song in the sort of secured place like you'd house a fire extinguisher, and then on the day, she broke the glass, played the ballad and was properly gutted by it.
