We know, courtesy of Us Weekly, that Kristen Stewart spreads butter on her blueberry bagels. People magazine just chronicled her alleged romance with her Twilight co-star, Robert Pattinson, in an entire issue devoted to the movie franchise. And everyone from Access Hollywood to The New Zealand Herald has chewed over her supposedly “moody”, “mopey”, “melancholy” demeanour. What hardly anyone outside Hollywood knows—or at least recognises—is perhaps that at 19, Stewart is considered to be one of the most promising actresses of her generation, with Oscar winners like Sean Penn and Jodie Foster lining up to offer praise.

“I do wish that people would focus more on the work,” said Stewart, who reprises her role as Bella Swan, an ordinary high school girl who falls in love with a sensitive vampire, in The Twilight Saga: New Moon. “But I understand that what you do as an actor is tied up in who you are as a person. What really kills me is when people think I’m abrasive, inconsiderate or ungrateful because I don’t go outside in a bikini and wave to the paparazzi. Come on!”

Life as a teen idol has never been easy. But navigating the obsessive attention of young fans amid today’s media landscape—all Twitter, all YouTube, all TMZ, all the time—can be particularly harrowing. Stewart is not just an actress playing a popular role. Instead “Twi-hards” have come to project their version of romantic love on her.

Stewart has coped with the suffocating attention by giving off an air of inapproachability, that Chris Weitz, the director of New Moon, said she has methodically adopted. “If she didn’t, every teenage girl would see her as their best friend,” he said. “They would tear her completely apart.”

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