Kristen Stewart and Steven Yeun Find Love After the Apocalypse

A buoy and a satellite fall in love. It sounds like the beginning of a strange, obscure joke, but it is in fact the premise of Love Me, an experimental new sci-fi romance movie starring Kristen Stewart and Steven Yeun. It’s a premise dreamed up by Sam and Andy Zuchero, the couple and filmmaking duo known collectively as the Zucheros, after they came up with a rather bleak thought experiment: What would happen if robots inherited the Earth? But despite the grim starting point of this hypothetical, the conclusion that they came to was actually, surprisingly, quite hopeful.

“We realized it wasn't about AI or robots, but it was about us and these two new beings trying to figure out what life is like and what love is like,” Andy Zuchero tells Inverse. “And then it became the movie that you see.”

“It was just a shock every day.”

The movie that we see is a strange one, to say the least. The first half of the movie doesn’t even feature any humans, let alone its two A-list stars. Instead, we’re treated to static shots of the aforementioned buoy (voiced by Stewart) floating in the ocean, and the satellite (voiced by Yeun), which orbits the planet looking for life forms. Then, eventually, as the two objects connect and start to gain more sentience, they’re replaced by two digital avatars that (intentionally) look like they were lifted right out of Mark Zuckerberg’s Metaverse. It was a big risk for first-time feature filmmakers like the Zucheros to take. But they felt like they couldn’t make the movie any other way.

“It was scary making our first film with so many different mediums,” Sam Zuchero tells Inverse. “It was insane and exciting. [But] I want to dig into every medium with every other film that we do.”

For stars Kristen Stewart and Steven Yeun, even they couldn’t imagine what the finished product would’ve looked like, nor that they would’ve ended up performing most of the movie in motion-capture bodysuits. “Honestly, when I read the script, I had no idea we were going to do any of the things that we ended up doing,” Yeun tells Inverse.

“It was just a shock every day,” Stewart adds to Inverse.

From Sound Booth to Bodysuit

Stewart and Yeun started the film with the voice acting portion, playing opposite each other in dueling soundbooths. The purity of this kind of performance appealed to Stewart who, unlike Yeun, hadn’t done much voice acting before. “I really loved the voice stuff because [it] embodied [this] really earnest, desperate ‘call out for connection’ thing,” she says.

Then came the mo-cap suits. For about a month, the two of them donned body suits to perform as the virtual avatars of their characters, Me (Stewart’s buoy) and I Am (Yeun’s satellite). The avatars were created in Stewart and Yeun’s likeness by animation company Kickstart Entertainment and were intentionally made to look like Metaverse creations. “When we started filming, it was right when Mark Zuckerberg gave his keynote for the Metaverse, so it was the first time we saw those characters. So in a way, they're modeled off of that because we wanted to be true to what the internet is circa 2025,” Andy Zuchero says.

Over the course of a year, the animators took Stewart and Yeun’s performances and turned them into the slightly uncanny digital avatars that the stars appear as for the majority of the film. But, ironically, that was the part of the film that Stewart and Yeun enjoyed the most as performers.

“Sometimes as an actor, all you want is to be seen, and sometimes you're like, ‘I don't know if that angle's doing it. I don't know, I'm going to look away at that moment,’” Stewart says. “[The mo-cap suits] could track your minute movements. You can't hide, you cannot get away from the people looking at you, which is actually great. It just feels like why you want to be an actor, is to show everything.”

“Suddenly to have a body, I just felt more vulnerable.”

The mo-cap portion was the Zucheros’ favorite part too — for them, it was like doing a play on a closed set with two of their favorite actors. “We could just do this play over and over again,” Sam Zuchero says. “It was a time where we got to just experiment and get to know the characters.”

Back to Reality

Stewart and Yeun only appear as themselves for the last 15 minutes of the movie. But after almost a month of embodying their characters from the voice-acting booth and in a mo-cap suit, going back to live-action was jarring. “The hardest stuff was when it got real again,” Stewart says. “Because it was like we were playing people that were not real. We were playing individuals that didn't have bodies yet. And suddenly to have a body, I just felt more vulnerable.”

The fact that the first big live-action sequence that the duo shot was a chaotic “wedding sequence,” when Me, insecure after she and I Am finally have sex, decides to fast-forward their relationship. It is a frenetic sequence made of several long takes, in which Me rushes I Am through a wedding, a pregnancy, and a baby all in the course of several minutes. “It was embarrassing. It was fake and weird and running around in the wedding dress,” Stewart recalls.

“That [sequence] was interesting because we speed around that in a way,” Yeun says. “We shot all that stuff in one sitting, and it was multiple different days of those two, their lives… It was very brutal where you're like, ‘Oh, what am I, who am I? What is going on?’ And then there was also a freedom because we were halfway through and I felt like we had all just jumped in and you're just letting go and you felt safe.”

It’s a sequence that recalls the party scene in Darren Aronofsky’s mother!, a reference that Andy Zuchero says was intentional — something that became a cause for anxiety when Aronofsky himself showed up to the film’s Sundance premiere last year. “I was really nervous that he was going to come rip me out of my seat and slap me around,” Andy Zuchero says. Andy notes that Aronofsky didn’t mention the mother! reference but he “could see it in his eyes.”

But, for Stewart and Yeun, the confusion and chaos of the film felt fitting for a film like Love Me. “Seeing the bodysuits, seeing the costumes, everything felt like it was revealing itself as it went,” Yeun says. “And then the ride was like, ‘Are you going to fight this or are you going to let go?’”

The two chose to let go and just go with the flow. Kind of “like life,” Stewart adds.

Love Me is playing in theaters now.