Kristen Stewart doesn't quite think as fondly of her Twilight days as her fans do. She's talked about how she suffered from anxiety, with frequent panic attacks and a constant stomach ache as a teenager in the spotlight. But when she appeared on The Ellen DeGeneres Show today, she sounded a little bit more positive about looking back at that period of her life.
"I look at those photos and I feel like I’m looking at a college yearbook," Stewart told DeGeneres. "It was just after my high school experience would have been, so it feels like just after. I don’t jump right back into those memories, but as soon as you see a picture, you’re like, Ooh, god, it’s like yesterday."
While she admitted to DeGeneres that she's a little bit shy "on the weekends," Stewart also said she was motivated by fans to give herself over to the vampire movies. "[Twilight] was something I really invested in," she explained. "It mattered to so many people. Something personal became not the most personal thing, which is awesome, because to share that is great, but then at the same time I was 17 or 18 when it all kind of went down, and that’s the most uncomfortable, terrible, weird — you're 17 and like, Whaaaa! But at the same time, it was good. It kind of forced me to stand at attention in this way."
(You have to watch the clip for a better understanding of that noise she made when describing what being 17 is like — though it's safe to assume that's what most of us also felt like at that age, albeit with a lot more privacy.)
As Stewart promotes Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, one of six movies she has coming out this year, she acknowledges how much she gained by pushing herself when she was young.
"When I do stuff that scares me, good things happen," she said.