Kristen Stewart reflected on coming out as queer recently, accusing those who discouraged her of wanting her “to live a partial life.”

While promoting her directorial debut, The Chronology of Water on ABC News’ All Access with Linsey Davis, the Twilight star explained that coming out publicly while hosting a 2017 episode of Saturday Night Live “was less about sharing the details of my relationship and more so acknowledging that there are people that don’t get full access to being alive because they’re hiding.”

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“I’ve had conversations with people who I’ve known, loved, and trusted, and still do, who thought, you know, your career would do better if you didn’t go outside holding your girlfriend’s hand,” Stewart recalled. “And I was like, ‘So, you want me to live a partial life. And you want me to uphold and perpetuate and sustain a system that excludes people.’ And I just can’t do that.”

Stewart, who famously dated Twilight co-star Robert Pattinson early in her career and married screenwriter Dylan Meyer last year, has told a version of this story before. In a 2019 interview with Harper’s Bazaar, the Happiest Season star said she’d been told that if she didn’t hold her girlfriend’s hand in public, she’d be more likely to land a role in a Marvel movie.

But speaking to Davis, Stewart said that wasn’t why she waited to come out.

“I protected my relationships when I was on the cover of tabloids, and it was very obvious who I was dating, and it was like, ‘You guys are getting it all anyway… I don’t need to caption this for you,’” she explained, adding that she didn’t want to “commodify” certain details of her life. “But what I didn’t want to do was hide from the world that we live in. I want to define it. I want to make it a more open and accepting place.”

“I was already holding my girlfriend’s hand in public,” Stewart continued. “None of my relationships have felt guarded because I didn’t want people to know me. I want people to know me. I felt like they did! So, I didn’t really need to fill in the blanks. But at that point, it just felt like a statement that just might unlock other people’s doors.”

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