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‘I’m no longer the person who feels like they shouldn’t be at the party’: Kirsten Dunst
She’s been a movie star since she was 11, but it’s only now, 30 years later, that the actor feels that she’s arrived.
Kirsten Dunst was just 11 when she filmed Interview with the Vampire with Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt, but she says she had a pretty ordinary childhood. Credit: Sam Taylor-Johnson/CPi Syndication/Headpress
W e’re not long into Civil War, writer/director Alex Garland’s dystopian near-future action film about the disintegration of the USA, when we realise this is a story which will not pull any punches. Long after the credits have rolled, the impact of its extraordinary sequences stays with you.
It is therefore unsurprising to discover that the film’s star, 41-year-old Kirsten Dunst, was mindful of the boundaries between performance and real life even as the film’s script seemed to rip itself from the apocalyptic headlines of modern American political life.
“I am someone who does so much preparation for a role and has notes on every scene and reviews those notes every morning, and it’s inside of me,” Dunst tells Sunday Life. “I don’t feel I have to go home and live in this space. And I don’t want that for my children, to be honest.
“When I go home, I’m tired, but I’m their mother. I have videos of me learning my lines in bed with my son eating barbecue chips, because he’s staying up too late, and he wants to sleep with me. And I have a funny video of him rehearsing my lines with me.”
As day jobs go, though, Civil War is certainly a tough one. Dunst plays Lee, a photojournalist travelling through near-future “battlefield America” with her colleague Joel (Wagner Moura), her mentor Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson) and an ambitious rookie, Jessie (Cailee Spaeny). Around them, civil war is ravaging the nation.
Though the political origins of the film’s story are self-evident, director Garland keeps some of the details deliberately ambiguous. Dunst agrees that it was important to focus on the fact that the script is fiction, despite the “we’re nearly there” undercurrent in some of its more chilling scenes.
“This is a movie,” she says. “It’s terrifying and fascinating in equal measure because it’s in America, on American soil, done by an extremely provocative filmmaker. That is what a movie should do: make everyone ask questions and have these conversations. And I think that’s what Alex has done. He loves getting in the middle of things.”
But, Dunst adds, the film is a warning “about what happens when people stop telling the truth, wanting the truth, listening to and treating each other with humanity”.
Perhaps the least surprising thing about Civil War is finding Dunst in it. In a career spanning three decades, she’s never shied away from provocative or challenging work.
Dunst was just 11 when she filmed Interview with the Vampire with Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt, and Little Women opposite Winona Ryder and Claire Danes. Despite being a very famous kid, Dunst says she had a pretty ordinary childhood.
“I always went to normal schools, I’ve had the same best friend since sixth grade, and I always had my seat at the lunch table. In high school I had such a solid group of girlfriends.”
Dunst says she was “such an innocent kid” when she made Interview with the Vampire. “I don’t even think I watched the movie. Yes, I was famous, but I was young, so what was I doing? I was just going to school. I wasn’t doing anything.”
What she did have, she says, were extraordinary female role models. Like her Little Women co-stars, Danes and Ryder, and director Gillian Armstrong. Plus Allison Janney, with whom she appeared in Drop Dead Gorgeous. And she was directed in The Virgin Suicides by Sofia Coppola, who remains a close friend. As we touch on each in our conversation, Dunst refers to them as “some of the major women of our time”.
“I had very good female role models in this industry during the hardest years of my life,” she says. “And by hardest, I mean becoming a woman in this industry, what that looks like, while you’re discovering films yourself and learning about what films you like.
“I had some of the best guidance, in terms of women to look up to. It really stuck with me, having those formative years heavily influenced by very important females in my life. The only thing I wish now is that I’d learnt guitar or had some kind of hobby. I was always acting. I never really had time for that stuff.”
“Now that I’m almost 42, the most meaningful thing to me is when younger actresses or actors come up and speak to me.”Credit: Sam Taylor-Johnson/CPi Syndication/Headpress
Between 2002 and 2007, Dunst, who had always leaned towards independent productions, starred opposite Tobey Maguire in three Spider-Man films – she played Mary Jane Watson, Spidey’s love interest. “That catapulted me into a different kind of fame,” she says. “I was finding a new way to navigate my career at that point.”
I scour Dunst’s filmography for a transformational career moment, a pivot when things tilted from what they were to what they are. But as we talk, I realise that moment did not come on screen, but off.
“Where it changed was when people got cameras on their mobile phones,” she says. “I remember being in London – I think I was shooting Wimbledon [2004] – and someone came up to me and was like, ‘Can I take a picture?’ It was the first time in my life someone had asked me for a picture, and I was like, ‘Oh, this is all going to change now.’”
If childhood fame and the global recognition of a superhero franchise plant flags in the first two acts of Dunst’s career, the actor’s more recent projects might well define the third.
Roles in Lars von Trier’s Melancholia (2011) and Theodore Melfi’s Hidden Figures (2016) gave glimpses of her growth. Stunning performances in the television series On Becoming a God in Central Florida (2019) and Jane Campion’s film The Power of the Dog (2021) confirmed it. In a sense, perhaps, the movie star was nudged out of the frame so that the actor could take the spotlight.
“Everybody has ups and downs in their popularity over a career,” she says. “Now that I’m almost 42, the most meaningful thing to me is when younger actresses or actors come up and speak to me. That’s the point where you’re like, ‘Now I’m part of the group I was intimidated by before. I’m one of the people who people now look up to.’
“We creatively fell in love first. So there’s a respect there and a mutual admiration of space and creativity and what the other one needs.”
KIRSTEN DUNST
“That’s really what feels like the best. I’m no longer the person who feels like they shouldn’t be at the party.”
Away from the screen, Dunst has been in a relationship with actor Jesse Plemons since 2016. The pair met while making Fargo, became engaged in 2017, had two sons (Ennis in 2018 and James in 2021), and got married in 2022.
“As actors, there was zero romance,” Dunst says. “We creatively fell in love first, I think. So there’s a respect there and a mutual admiration of space and creativity and what the other one needs. I always have him read a script. He always has me read his scripts. He’s one of my favourite actors.”
Plemons also has a role in Civil War. “On the set we didn’t even talk to each other – he has to be in a certain headspace to do his scenes. But he blew me away. I was like, ‘F---, he’s such a good actor.’”
There are no swords or fantastical beasts in Civil War, but the film is not short on movie-grade hardware. There are large-scale set pieces in extraordinary locations that shove present-day America into a kind of post-apocalyptic horror. And being a film about photojournalists, there are a lot of cameras.
As soon as Dunst accepted the role, Garland sent her the camera belonging to Dunst’s character, to give her time to familiarise herself with it. “Looking like a fraud with my camera, that terrified me,” she says. “I haven’t had a camera strapped to my wrist for years, so I kept it wrapped around my wrist for a good two months before we started, to be as much at ease with it as possible.
“With all the running with those heavy cameras, there’s a lot of physicality you don’t think about that came with playing this role. There were lots of different facets I had to learn for playing Lee.”
One of those is the manner in which the film deals with Lee’s post-traumatic stress disorder without naming it or diving into it in an obvious way. Instead, the audience sees small fractures begin to appear in Lee’s peace of mind, building to a more substantial manifestation in the film’s third act.
Though the impact of the battlefield on soldiers is well documented, the effect on journalists is less well known. There is no question, though, that it is deep and damaging. Dunst’s performance is delicately balanced between scenes in which she and her fellow journalists gather in a hotel bar to decompress, and scenes in the field in which the knots begin to fray.
“They gather in that hotel lobby and they drink together,” Dunst says. “They download what they have for the day, and they rely on each other. Because to live on the edge of death takes a unique human. It’s so heroic. They go into combat with no weapons and have to deal with really horrendous situations just to stay alive.”
Civil War is in cinemas April 11.
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