LOS ANGELES—Kristen Stewart will be 19 in April, but she has had a high profile in the film industry since she was 12, when she starred as Jodie Foster’s daughter in Panic Room. She admits, however, that she wasn’t prepared for the fame that has come with starring in Twilight, one of last year’s biggest hits. As she gets ready to start on the second installment of the series, New Moon, she says she finds it hard to get used to some of the questions that have come with the movie’s success.

“It is so weird for me to have people ask me, ”˜Who are you wearing?’ ” she says in an L.A. hotel room. “Talking about fashion is very strange, because fashion is not something I think about a lot, and yet it is such big thing for the media now.”

As she prepares to shoot New Moon in Vancouver, Stewart is promoting her latest film, Adventureland, which opens April 3. She says the character she plays in the film, a girl who asserts her independence from her wealthy father and new stepmother by working at a lousy job at an amusement park, wasn’t difficult to portray, given that the only job she has ever had is acting.

“I related to her because I like characters that are whole,” she says. “It is easy to tell how they would feel about something, because they are very defined. So I got all my intuition from the script. The affair [with a married man played by Ryan Reynolds] wasn’t difficult to play either, because I understand all the masochistic aspects that girls are good at. I could relate to all that. She has a void, but it is not being filled by that distraction because she is ashamed of it. She doesn’t tell people about it, but she keeps doing it.”

Despite the added attention, Stewart says she is looking forward to playing Bella, a mortal girl who falls for a vampire, in the second and third installments of the Twilight saga. (Part 3 is called Eclipse.) “Six months have passed in the story,” she says. “The first one is all about devotion and is an ultimate love story, and now, because she is on her own, she is going to be stripped of that. But I think that if you read the books [on] which the movies are based, you can see that Bella is an interesting character on her own.”

Stewart adds that she doesn’t think that parents of the young girls who have made her a star will be concerned about her playing rocker Joan Jett in Runaways, which will be shooting between the two Twilight episodes. “I think Joan is a remarkable role model for any young girl. She was the first female to start a record label, when she was in her early 20s, and she is an activist. I can’t see why anyone would complain about that.”