Kristen Stewart wants to be known for something other than biting her lip dramatically as a sparkly vampire broods gently into the night. No, K-Stew is a real actress. And she actually works on projects other than stuff involving vampires! Which is how she got to the Sundance Film Festival, where she is promoting two projects. The first is The Runaways, the one that’s already garnered quite a bit of attention, mainly because Kristen chopped off her Bella hair. The second film is Welcome to the Rileys, where Kristen plays a young stripper who gets “rescued” by James Gandolfini’s character. All of this has added up to Kristen being declared “The Queen of Sundance”. She probably hates that. Here’s more about her role as a stripper:

Welcome to the Rileys was a real pain for Kristen Stewart—literally.

In the much buzzed about indie flick, she plays a 16-year-old stripper who is taken in by a married man, played by James Gandolfini…

“I did some pole dancing,” Stewart told me Saturday at the movie’s premiere at the Sundance Film Festival. “I got bruises all over my legs. I tore myself up doing it. It sucked.”

Oddly enough, she kinda enjoyed it. “The more I saw it, the more I wanted it,” Stewart said. “It was like a weird self-hating kind of thing.”

Yikes!

Director Jake Scott said it was pretty much a closed set when Stewart had to do her dancing scenes.

“She was terrified,” Scott said. “The strip club we shot in was really a club, and it really was that dirty and really that tough. But she killed it.”

Scott also hooked Stewart up with a professional stripper. “She’s like one of the best in the business,” he said. “So she was really reliable and didn’t do drugs or anything like that, but she was able to introduce Kristen to girls that were. She was able to put her in that world.”

But if you’re expecting Showgirls moves from Stewart, you can forget about it. “This is not about a stripper,” Scott said. “It’s about a damaged child.”

Stewart said, “The cool thing about my character is she is not sultry and she is not sexy.”

[From E! News]

I should mention that Kristen is also getting a ton of buzz about The Runaways (trailer here) now that people are actually seeing it. People seem to love Dakota Fanning in it too, and if this new clip (below) of a scene between Dakota and Kristen is any indication, I think Dakota has an acting range far beyond her years. Oh, and Dakota and Kristen have some sort of makeout scene, but who really cares about that? Jeez.

‘The Runaways’ poster courtesy of MTV and Collider. Dakota Fanning and Kristen Stewart at Sundance on January 22, 2010. Credit: Fame Pictures.