Why so blue? Kristen Stewart gets a lot of grief for her unsmiling expressions on the red carpet, in magazine spreads, and when being photographed by the paparazzi. But the Twilight star, 24, doesn’t let it bother her. In fact, she thinks people would complain no matter what.

“Now I feel like if I smiled for a paparazzi photo — not that I ever would —that’s exactly what people would be desecrating me for,” she said in the September issue of Elle. “They’d be like, ‘now you’re going to give it up, now you’re a sellout.’ Like, okay. What do you want? What would you like?”

The fashion-forward cover girl’s unusual Elle photo shoot was taken inside the Fields Market in West Hills, Calif., as she posed in front of produce and canned goods.

The former child star’s career exploded in 2008 with the release of the first Twilight film, and she can pinpoint the moment when she first realized that she had reached a new level of fame.

“The day the movie came out there was a picture of me—in the New York Post,” she recalled. “I was sitting on my front porch, smoking a pipe with my ex-boyfriend [Michael Angarano] and dog. And I was like, ‘Oh shit, well, I have to be aware of that.’”

Though Rob Pattinson’s ex now understands her status in Hollywood, she doesn’t have a great master plan for her career.

“Never at any point have I sat down and plotted how I should proceed from here on,” she said. “As soon as you start thinking about your career as a trajectory — like, as if you’re going to miss out on some wave or momentum — then you’re never doing anything for yourself anyway. Then you’re truly, actually, specifically working for the public. You’re turning yourself into a bag of chips.”