The actress won’t be Team Edward or Team Jacob in “Flesh of the Gods.”
More than a decade after Kristen Stewart last played Bella Swan in the Twilight movies, the actress is returning to the world of bloodsuckers.
Stewart is set to star opposite Oscar Isaac in Flesh of the Gods, a vampire thriller from director Panos Cosmatos, producers announced Thursday. The two will play a married couple who “descend each evening from their luxury skyscraper condo and head into an electric nighttime realm of 80’s Los Angeles,” according to a news release. “When they cross paths with the mysterious and enigmatic Nameless and her hard-partying cabal, Raoul and Alex are seduced into a glamorous, surrealistic world of hedonism, thrills, and violence.”
Penned by Seven screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker and produced by Adam McKay’s Hyperobject Industries, Flesh of the Gods will be selling at the Cannes film market next month and is expected to begin shooting this year.
Cosmatos, whose previous credits include the 2018 Nicolas Cage horror flick Mandy, concluded that his new movie will take viewers on “a hot rod joy ride deep into the glittering heart of hell.” (Whoa.)
The director’s leading lady was just 18 when she portrayed Bella in the first of five Twilight films, which was released in 2008. The movies’ massive success at the box office — they earned more than $3 billion worldwide — quickly made her unbelievably famous.
Based on Stephenie Meyers’ books, Twilight depicts Stewart’s Bella as a high school student who finds herself caught between Robert Pattinson’s Edward, a vampire, and werewolf Jacob (Taylor Lautner), before — spoiler alert — she ultimately chooses the vampire life.
Just last month Stewart revealed that, in real life, she “would have broken up with” Edward immediately over his desire to control her. “I get the sort of protection thing, but you gotta let a girl make her own choices,” she said on the Not Skinny But Not Fat podcast.
The Love Lies Bleeding star has also said that, in hindsight, the Twilight franchise has queer undertones. “I can only see it now,” Stewart, who came out as queer in 2017, told Variety in January. “I don’t think it necessarily started off that way, but I also think that the fact that I was there at all, it was percolating. It’s such a gay movie.”
Although Twilight had major commercial success, it was another film, 2021’s Spencer, that earned Stewart her first Oscar nomination. That time she played a human, the late Princess Diana.
Her costar Isaac, meanwhile, is known for a wide array of screen projects including the musical drama Inside Llewyn Davis, the Stars Wars sequel trilogy, the Marvel series Moon Knight, and the sci-fi drama Ex Machina.
