What role was Kristen Stewart hungry for?

The Twilight star expressed her interest in portraying Maria Enders’ assistant Valentine in Olivier Assayas’ drama immediately after reading the script.

“Initially I was like, ‘Wow, this is hilarious! This is so true! This is so perfect and spot-on and I would love to say those words!’,” she told the Hollywood Reporter.

She admitted to being disappointed when she found out Mia Wasikowska had been given the part. After she got in touch with producer Charles Gillibert, Kristen said she was offered the part of the movie star.

“I just couldn’t really wrap my head around it. It’s a good part, but if I played an actress involved in this scandal, in the extreme way that it’s presented in the film, it would have been satirical for me and just not as interesting,” she said.

“So I fought for it [the part of the assistant], and then the stars shifted in some way and it all worked out.”

Kristen stepped in as Valentine after Mia dropped out of the film, and said she was happy to have a supporting role. She won the best supporting actress Cesar prize for her performance.

“They are people that we don’t get a glimpse at [in movies], typically,” she said. “I’ve seen so many of those scenes play out in real life. You know, weird stuff goes on behind closed doors, and we sort of open them up and go, ‘This is what might be going on in this woman’s life’.”

The actress, who turns 25 on April 9, said she was thrilled to get into this French, dialogue-driven film anchored exclusively by women.

“It’s two women sitting in a room basically talking about being women and movies and their lives and their perspectives, and it never really cuts away from that. That would never be greenlit in this country,” she said.

“Maybe you could do that movie for, like, a million dollars [in the US], but not with the honour that they [the French] give to the stories that they tell, and how indulgent but completely unfrivolous they are, and how willing they are to take risks.”

“They make movies because they have a compulsion to tell certain stories, they don’t make movies to become rich and famous, and that is a huge, massive divide between European and American cinema,” Kristen continued.

“The people who I’d like to work with in the States share that — but you have to find them.”

The actress, best known for playing Bella Swan opposite Robert Pattinson’s Edward Cullen in the Twilight films, also spoke out about the constant media attention she faced.

“I’m fully and 100 per cent subject to that. It has taken serious adjustment time,” she said, adding: “There’s just nothing that I can really do about that. I love what I do and so it’s worth protecting. Hopefully, one day people’s priorities will shift a little bit.”