Spencer S Kristen Stewart Tried To Vomit On Set As Princess Diana

The “Spencer” star, who is nominated for Best Actress at the 2022 Oscars, set out to fully embody Princess Diana’s bulimia and actually make herself throw up while in character. “I’ll fucking do anything,” Stewart told Vanity Fair as part of their annual Hollywood Issue. “I wanted to make sure that was not glossed over.” Director Pablo Larraín filmed Stewart as she struggled to vomit; it seems like the take was kept in the final film. “I couldn’t throw up on this movie, even when I really should have,” Stewart said. “I felt like absolute shit and I could not get it up, and I know it was because my body was just like…the idea of that was so untouchable.” Many of the film’s key dramatic scenes feature Stewart’s Diana struggling in private with her eating disorder. But in one nightmarish fantasy moment over a decorous royal dinner, she imagines she’s choking on her own necklace, scooping pearls out of her soup, and is met with blank stares by the rest of her family — and a hallucination of 16th-century English Queen Anne Boleyn — before fleeing to the toilet.

Stewart previously described the dinner scene as like “an emotional Heimlich maneuver” to IndieWire‘s Eric Kohn. “It’s like literally she needed to go to the bathroom and cough out whatever blockage [she had]. That whole thing was Pablo placing these elements that were so opposed all around me; I was surrounded,” Stewart said. “As much as she’s a bit of an aggressor in this scene, it’s embedded in her nightmarish fantasy. In reality, she’s receding. In every direction you look, there’s something to hide from. And then in this one moment, it shifts into, ‘Maybe this isn’t really happening, and this is something that is just totally subjective.’…She’s really, really lost and it’s something that is going to a level of madness that’s quite intense, and it ends in the bathroom.” Stewart added of Larraín, “I was really surprised that he was capable of pushing it as far as he did, and still kept it really emotional and tasteful.” According to Stewart, the auteur was hoping “Spencer” could be “as good as ‘A Woman Under the Influence,’” which led Stewart to channel Princess Di’s loneliness to a breaking point. “One of the remarkable things is that she was so friendless,” Stewart added. “I’m constantly going, ‘Where was your fucking homie?’” And while Larraín explained to IndieWire that “Spencer” is an “upside-down fairy tale,” Stewart became a twisted princess and transformed into a “poetic combination of herself and Diana” during production. “I don’t know what most people see in Kristen, but I see someone who was able to find the physicality and style of the great actresses of ‘50s and ‘60s,” Larraín said. “We felt like we were looking at an old-school type of performance in the best possible way. We just couldn’t stop admiring what she was doing.”