Kristen Stewart is set to star as bisexual American activist Susan Sontag in an upcoming biopic.
The film, based on the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Biography winner “Sontag: Her Life and Work” by Benjamin Moser, will be directed by Kirsten Johnson and co-written by her and Lisa Kron. It will be a mix of biopic drama and documentary footage. Gabrielle Tana, the producer of the project, said that they will be using the Berlin Film Festival, where Stewart is the jury president, to kick off the project by taking documentary footage and talking to her about how she plans to take on the role of Sontag.
Susan Sontag was an American writer, philosopher, and political activist who became active in the 1960s, especially at the height of the Vietnam War. She wrote several plays, fiction, and essays, touching on several issues including AIDS. She had known her bisexuality since her teenage years and was open about it. Although she had been in several relationships throughout her life, her partner until her death in 2004 was photographer Annie Leibovitz from 1989.
Stewart herself came out as bisexual in 2017. In 2022, she finished her directorial debut film ‘The Chronology of Water’ which is about American bisexual swimmer Lidia Yuknavitch. In an interview with South China Morning Post, Stewart said alongside her self-discovery journey, she’s played several gender-fluid characters, and she’s “happy to be able to defend and tell those stories as a director.”
Stewart recently took on several pseudo-biopics including ‘Spencer,’ a fictional story about Princess Diana’s life, ‘Seberg,’ about French New Wave actress Jean Seberg, ‘JT LeRoy’ about Savannah Knoop, and Lizzie Borden’s maid Bridget Sullivan in ‘Lizzie.’
