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Kristen Stewart is revisiting her decision to publicly come out when she hosted Saturday Night Live in 2017.

The Chronology of Water director, 35, sits down for an interview airing Monday, Feb. 2, on ABC News Live Prime with Linsey Davis, nearly nine years after she first came out during an SNL monologue. At the time, she proclaimed she is “so gay, dude,” while directly addressing President Donald Trump.

“It was less about sharing the details of my relationship and more so acknowledging that there are people that don’t get full access to being alive because they’re hiding,” Stewart says in PEOPLE’s exclusive clip from the interview.

“I’ve experienced perspectives [and] I’ve had conversations with people I’ve known, loved and trusted and still do, who thought, ‘Your career would go better if you didn’t go outside holding your girlfriend’s hand.’ And I was like, ‘So you want me to live a partial life? And you want me to uphold, perpetuate and sustain a system that excludes people?’ And I just can’t do that,” she added.

Stewart’s romantic life has been the subject of public and media interest dating back to her relationship with Twilight costar Robert Pattinson during the early 2010s. She came out as gay while addressing some 11 posts Trump made on Twitter about her and Pattinson in 2012 during that SNL monologue.

During her ABC News interview, Stewart noted that it was “really obvious what’s going down” when her personal life received media coverage before she came out.

The actress noted that she “didn’t want to commodify those details,” but felt they were in the open anyway.

“I didn’t want to be part of a comic book. But what I didn’t want to do was hide from the world we live in,” she added. “I want to define it, I want to make it a more open and accepting place. And so I thought it was necessary for me to— I was already holding my girlfriend’s hand in public.”

“None of my relationships have felt guarded because I didn’t want people to know me. I want people to know me,” she said. “I felt like they did, so I didn’t really need to fill in the blanks. But at that point it felt like a statement that just might unlock other people’s doors.”

Stewart began dating Dylan Meyer in 2019; they married in April 2025. When she most recently spoke with PEOPLE at the Variety Creative Impact Awards on Jan. 4, Stewart cited getting married as she described 2025 as “the craziest year of my life,” alongside both her and Meyer, 38, making new movies as directors.

“I was so carbonated over the last year. I need to get flat… I need to go fizz out,” she quipped at that event.