Kristen S

Kristen to shine after Twilight

The infamously stroppy Kristen Stewart is no more as the young star discovers there is life after Twilight, Stevie Wong and Neala Johnson report. That famed sourpuss expression? It's gone. Today's Kristen Stewart - 21 and soon to leave behind the Twilight franchise that changed her life - seems less inhibited, more open. She has a glow, if you will, where previously there was a pout.

So what's going on?

"Honestly, it's not that I'm more willing to share, it's just that I'm more able to," Stewart says. "I wasn't really able to express myself. I've just gotten a little bit more comfortable. You learn by experience, that's all. It's a really simple answer."

Thankfully, this does not mean the young actor is apologetic... or any less rambling... or any less forthright when she does get to the point.

"I was scared," she explains of her demeanour with the media. "I didn't want to seem like so many people that I'd seen that just... bleugh... I was too preoccupied with how I didn't wanna seem, so I wasn't necessarily always myself."

So who is Stewart nowadays, after bringing in $1.8 billion at the worldwide box office and on the eve of the release of the second-last Twilight film, Breaking Dawn - Part 1?

After starting acting before she even hit double figures, she is an unlikely veteran and an unconventional new Hollywood power player. Yet she still prefers to trade under the blue-collar "working actor" label.

"It's how you approach it while you're actually working, what you think your job is," she explains. "I know everyone says, 'Well, all the press stuff is half the job, you can't discredit this side of it'. It's like, no, absolutely not. But this... " - she gestures into the air, indicating everything from promotional duties to trappings of celebrity - "Doesn't. Matter. To. Me. At. All.

"Like, genuinely, I could do it [acting] myself in the dark... as long as I was working with the same people that I'm working with now," she laughs.

Stewart's "now" is Snow White and the Huntsman, a Lord of the Rings-style epic shooting in the UK in which she plays a warrior Snow White to Aussie Chris Hemsworth's hunky Huntsman. When she met Hit earlier this week, she was sporting a bandage on her wrist - a torn ligament the result of some over-exuberance on set.

"I hurt myself doing a fight scene with some dwarfs."

That's not something you get to say every day.

"I know! It is a high-contact sport, this movie. It's full-on every day. I bruised the top of my foot just running. This ligament pull was really bad. Every day I come back I have bruises literally from here to here."

"But it's only because I go crazy, I lose my mind as soon as we start."