EXCLUSIVE: Kristen Stewart Recalls First Love: 'It's the Most Intense, Overwhelming Feeling'
Kristen Stewart can't help but feel deeply.
ET recently sat down with the notoriously passionate actress and her Equals co-star, Nicholas Hoult, to talk about their dramatic new sci-fi film, in which the two play characters who fall in love in a futuristic society where emotions have been outlawed. Stewart says she definitely pulled from her own intense experience of falling in love for the first time to play the role of Nia.
"I read the script and I was just like, 'This is going to suck and hurt to think about,'" Stewart, 26, admits to ET's Katie Krause. "You just place yourself in that feeling that maybe you've had before -- it's the most visceral, intense, overwhelming feeling -- so when it's really great, it's epically great, and when it's really bad, it's epically bad."
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"So we knew going into it, this was gonna be like ... 'Oof, this is going to hurt,'" she continues.
As for Hoult, 26, he just remembers feeling "mental" around his first love.
"The first time you fall in love, you are so mental that it's very difficult to recall anything, isn't it?" he jokes.
Stewart also definitely sees similarities between Nia and her most famous role as Bella in Twilight -- specifically, when it comes to how much they're both willing to give up when it comes to love. Stewart defends both characters as being "f**king courageous."
"I'm obviously really drawn to that idea ... that element of both stories is kind of what turns me on the most about them, it’s that idea of being, like, seemingly weak or subject to something in terms of just your capacity," Stewart says. "You're emotional, you are completely raw and you are willing to give it all up for someone, and so it seems that maybe, like, you're on bottom or something -- like you are somehow giving yourself away -- but really you are finding yourself in doing that. It's bold to do that, it's f**king courageous to give yourself to someone like that."
Clearly, Stewart and Hoult, who have both been involved in highly publicized romances and breakups -- Stewart with her Twilight co-star Robert Pattinson, and Hoult with his X-Men: Apocalypse co-star Jennifer Lawrence -- bonded while making Equals. But Stewart says it's the innocence of their characters in the film that actually made their intimate scenes much less awkward to shoot.
"There is something so pure about the elements of intimacy in this one -- they're doing and experiencing things for the very first time with no regard for any predisposed ideas of what that might mean," Stewart explains. "They are just very animalistic ... like babies born into adult bodies. There was nothing embarrassing. It was all kind of, like, beautiful and pure."
ET chatted with Equals director Drake Doremus in May, when he opened up about the two's steamy bathroom and shower scene.
"We carefully structured the shoot so that the bathroom scene was the first time they really touched in the film and really touched when we were shooting," Doremus revealed. "It was this release and this feeling. What happens in the film was really happening on set."
"I think they were just losing themselves," Doremus added, noting that he was very much "a passenger" during filming. "At that point, they're just in it."
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Equals hits theaters on July 15.
Watch the emotional trailer below: