I am not, for instance, talking about any experience from her past that she has quote-unquote risen above, like that time she was in those vampire-werewolf movies and dubbed the World’s Most Hated Actress because she did not appear sufficiently stoked to sit in a room full of journalists and discuss making out with her co-stars.

But they are also the qualities behind Stewart’s ability to make characters seem countercultural by virtue of the fact that she is playing them, bringing a reserve and restraint that might seem like underkill in a franchise in which she has to speak, out loud, lines like “Hello, biceps!” but that scintillates in more nuanced fare.

The morning after, having slept not a wink (“We were really Englanding out”), she came down to the lobby of her swanky “press junket” hotel for a meeting with director Rose Glass, whose debut film, Saint Maud — a psychological fever dream about religious obsession — Stewart had loved.

By the time she left the meeting, Stewart knew she would take the part that Glass had written with her in mind — the role of Lou, the gym manager, who is butch and tough and closed like a fist, until the bodybuilder, Jackie, explodes her whole world — but she didn’t officially sign on until she’d returned to L.A. and read the script.

Afterward, Stewart finished the campaign expected of Oscar-nominated actors (“It becomes like you’re teaching a curriculum on your movie”) and then flew to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where Love Lies Bleeding would film, showing up at Glass’ house with a stylist to lay waste to Diana’s blond hair, even grabbing the scissors at the end to make it look like Lou had cut her mullet herself.

When she was eight, and because she had noticed acting was the only job kids could have that allowed them to miss school, she asked her mom to take her to an audition seminar, one of those one-stop shops where you get headshots and the promise of being connected to some agents if you don’t suck too much.

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