Kristen Stewart was told to stop holding her girlfriend’s hand in public in order to win mainstream movie roles, the actor has said.

In a new interview with Harper’s Bazaar, Stewart said that, before she became an established star, she had “fully been told, ‘If you just like do yourself a favour, and don’t go out holding your girlfriend’s hand in public, you might get a Marvel movie.’” She added: “I don’t want to work with people like that.”

Stewart had been discussing with the interviewer why she felt more able to respond to the media and film audience’s interest in her sexuality. “I was informed by an old-school mentality, which is – you want to preserve your career and your success and your productivity, and there are people in the world who don’t like you, and they don’t like that you date girls, and they don’t like that you don’t identify as a quote unquote ‘lesbian’, but you also don’t identify as a quote unquote ‘heterosexual’. And people like to know stuff, so what the fuck are you?

“I just think we’re all kind of getting to a place where – I don’t know, evolution’s a weird thing – we’re all becoming incredibly ambiguous … And it’s this really gorgeous thing.”

Stewart had high-profile relationships with fellow Twilight actor Robert Pattinson and Snow White and the Huntsman director Rupert Sanders before revealing in 2015 a relationship with visual effects producer Alicia Cargile. Her most recent film Seberg, a biopic of troubled American film star Jean Seberg, has just premiered at the Venice film festival, while Charlie’s Angels – a rebooted adaptation of the hit 70s TV series, also starring Naomi Scott and Ella Balinska – is due for release in November.