Kristen Stewart has been cast to play Princess Diana in the upcoming film, Spencer, according to a report released by Deadline Hollywood.
The film, which will be directed by Pablo Larrain, will tell the story of Diana’s decision to end her marriage during the family’s Christmas holiday at an unspecified date sometime in the early 1990s.
According to the report, Larrain cast Stewart for the traits she had in common with the late Spencer. “Kristen can be many things, and she can be very mysterious and very fragile and ultimately very strong as well, which is what we need.” In addition to praising her response to the film’s script, he also referred to Stewart as a “force of nature.”
Larrain, a Chilean director whose others films include Neruda, a fictionalized account of Pablo Neruda’s flight from Chile in the wake of anti-LGBTQ+ suppression, told Deadline that he was most interested in portraying Diana not as the fairy tale princess but as the woman who decided that it was more important to be herself than to be the queen – what he calls “a fairy tale upside down. I’ve always been very surprised by that and thought it must have been very hard to do. That is the heart of the movie.”
Stewart’s own rise to stardom, playing Bella Swann in the Twilight saga, has a somewhat similar trajectory to Diana’s own meteoric rise. Like Spencer, her relationship, and very public split with co-star, Robert Patterson, made her the focus of intense media attention and scorn.
In the mid-2010s, she turned from the spotlight to focus her career on independent films, and on her own directorial debut with the short film, Come Swim, in 2017. She has recently made the transition back to mainstream pictures.
Spencer is scheduled to begin production early next year.
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