Kirsten Dunst pulls up in a black Chevrolet 4x4 with the engine running, dressed all in black and with dark sunglasses on and calls out, “Get in!”
We had planned to go for coffee, but Dunst has had a change of heart. It’s just after 3pm on a Friday in early March, the sun is out, and she has come from her eldest son’s parent-teacher meeting. (He is doing great!) She’s on a mild high – which might be the good grades, or the pungent raspberry energy drink she’s got sitting in the cup holder. “I can only drink half,” she says, “but it helps me get through the day.”
It’s nearly evening... Bar? I suggest. “I can’t drink during an interview,” she says. “I’ll say something bad.” But she would prefer to go to a bar. She steps on the accelerator as she jokes, “I’m doing illegal things to get there faster.”
With the car still running, she sends me to try the very closed-looking door of a dive bar near her home in Toluca Lake, a short drive away. No dice. That’s a shame, she tells me as I hop back in the car. Because now she’s going to have to take me somewhere really uncool.
The uncool place, a family-friendly whisky bar, is her local. “Let’s go in the back way,” she says, like someone who comes here often. It’s her kids’ favourite – they do a great cheese toastie. And it really is uncool: brown plaid upholstery on the seats, old-school tankards hanging from the ceilings and wood carvings of ducks on the walls. Is that a set of antlers? It is also refreshingly un-LA. On the menu, a disclaimer: “We are not gluten-free or vegan and cannot make those guarantees.” At 5pm, Dunst tells me, this place fills up with parents and their children on their way home from school.
Another change of heart: “Maybe I’ll have to get a drink,” she says, in line for the bar. Margarita? I suggest. “They do great margaritas.”
We return to our corner booth with two great margaritas. Dunst’s high levels up when she spots a set of parents whom she’s just seen at the parent-teacher meeting. “Oh my god. That is so funny,” she says. “I feel like, parent-teacher conference – straight to the bar. I’m happy I’m not alone.”
I tell her that I hope her decision to drink during an interview for the first time ever doesn’t go terribly wrong. “That’s on you,” she says. We clink glasses.
Let’s clear something up: you really don’t need to worry about Kirsten Dunst. She’s good. Blasting cigs in the Oscars smoking area good. Leading A24 blockbusters-in-waiting good. Back-to-back magazine covers good.
But that’s really just a snapshot of the life Dunst has been living. Away from the public eye, here in the San Fernando Valley, she’s been going to the cinema (she recently had a lot of fun with Anyone But You), playing tennis, dipping into her local for cheese toasties and margaritas, going out for dinners with her husband, the actor Jesse Plemons. Doing the kind of beautifully mundane shit that is not guaranteed for actors who begin working at three years old.
Last month, Dunst gave an interview that made people think – once it was spun through news aggregators and reduced to an out-of-context quote – that she wasn’t so good. She said that she had taken some time off from acting, and that she had only been offered “sad mum roles” since 2021’s The Power of the Dog, in which her portrayal of a sad mum in dusty 1920s Montana earned her a long-deserved Oscar nomination.
The way this was portrayed – that role limitations had precipitated her hiatus, or, in the least generous reading possible, that Dunst was struggling to get work – got Dunst’s position wrong.
How is Kirsten Dunst? I ask, just to be sure. “I’m goooood!” she says, elongating the word with genuine emphasis.
“It’s not hard to get roles,” she says. “I just don’t want to work on things because most things aren’t very good. Let’s just call a spade a spade here.” Plemons jokes that she can’t just work with auteurs – she’s only been in films directed by Alex Garland, Jane Campion and Sofia Coppola in the last seven years – but Dunst isn’t sure she agrees. She doesn’t need to work. “I’ve been working since I was three. Most people who have worked this long are retired. I deserve to be picky.”
Also (and it’s a big “also”), she’s been raising two young children. “In my opinion, I’ve had zero gaps. All I’ve been doing is mothering,” she says. Between 2021’s Power of the Dog and this year’s Civil War – the chewy, visceral new film, directed by Garland, in which she plays a war photographer documenting the USA coming apart at the seams – she gave birth to her second son. “Our youngest turned a year old [while I was filming] Civil War,” she says. “It takes a long time for a woman to recover. My body still wasn’t my body when I was making it.” Right now, she’s striking a balance between work and motherhood. “I’m either wiping an ass or giving an interview. There’s literally no in between.”
People do often see you as the last thing you play, though, she says. That bit is true. “It’s like the last interview you did, you know what I mean? It seems like people want to talk about the last interview I did a lot. It’s so boring.
“They’re like –” she affects a baby voice “– ‘Oh, she’s only offered these sad mom roles.’ Like, yeah I don’t want to play depressed [moms]. After Melancholia, I was being offered all depressed things. That’s why I did a comedy. I’m not that actress. I feel like, at this point in my life, I can play anything. I’m not afraid. I'd rather do something weird and off-kilter, and work with a first-time director, than do anything middle of the road, because I would just be depressed doing that.”
People seemed to like that she was bluntly honest about superhero movies, I say. She had said that she would consider doing another one because “you get paid a lot of money.” No one just says that kind of thing. “They don’t?” She lets out a bright ripple of laughter.
No, they don’t!
“Really? That’s the reason people do those movies!” The same laugh again, a little louder.
It was at least part of the reason she did Spider-Man in 2002, but there was a bit more purity to the whole thing back then, at the genesis of the modern comic-book-movie era. “It was more innocent, I think,” she says. “Sam Raimi was like a cult director, so it felt like we were making an indie disguised as a superhero film.”
Did anyone ask her to come back for Spider-Man: No Way Home? “No, no. I would have.”
She hasn’t seen it, so she doesn’t know exactly how that would have worked, but she likes the idea of revisiting the Mary Jane/Peter Parker relationship in an unexpected way. “It would be funny to be like, OK, let’s take Tobey [Maguire] and I and do it in a weird indie way where it’s like a different kind of superhero film,” she says. “Like how they did that movie Chronicle. It could be cool.”
The margarita has got her creative juices flowing. “People want us to make another Bring It On, too,” she says. “I mean, the script would have to be really good, and I don’t know what our positions would be or whatever… I talked to Peyton Reed, the director, about it.”
It makes a lot of sense in today’s film landscape, she says. Why not? “Mean Girls got redone, and I think that right now, women my age are the most powerful viewers, in a weird way.”
In the 38 years that Dunst has been acting, the industry has changed drastically, and she has spent much of that time trying to hold onto the things that make her Kirsten Dunst. The face she was born with. Her taste for films that are a little bit out there. Her friends and family, who don’t care that she’s a movie star (about halfway through our margaritas, she excuses herself to call the husband of a friend who is in labour to check how she’s getting on).
Dunst grew up about five minutes away from where we are now, in the San Fernando Valley. As a teenager, she used to walk from her house to a diner called Patys and drink milkshakes with her best friend, who is still her best friend today. Her mother, who managed Dunst’s career throughout her adolescence, would tail behind them in her car to make sure they arrived there safely. (Dunst found this out years later.) “My teenage years feel very innocent and protected,” she says. Her film career – which kicked off with Bonfire of the Vanities when she was eight but went into overdrive with Interview With a Vampire at 12 – didn’t disrupt that part of her life, only bringing about brief absences from school, the most anxiety-inducing part of which would be forgetting her locker code on her return. “I also had really good friends, so I could leave all that BS [behind] and have what really matters in my life.”
The Valley, she says, is the most “normal” place in Los Angeles to live, which is why she returned here after a stint in New York in her 20s. “I mean, look around,” she says. The people are not the kind you see sipping Erewhon smoothies and wearing athleisure in Calabasas – we could be in any run-of-the-mill town on the West Coast of the USA, though we’re in fact not a mile from the Warner Bros water tower. It’s all parents in understated smart-casual clothes. Everyone here is probably wealthy, sure, but there’s no pretence to any of it. “Silent luxury,” you might call it. “There’s definitely a look on the other side of the hill,” says Dunst.
It’s a look that Dunst has never attempted to emulate, even at the height of her fame, when no one could have rightfully blamed her for being swayed by trends or what her peers were doing.
Her big before-and-after moment came in a London Waitrose, funnily enough. It was right after Spider-Man had come out, and someone asked her for a picture. “I was like, Oh, this is where it all ends,” she says. “That to me was a big shift.”
She feels lucky, though, that she isn’t experiencing that kind of fame as a young person today. “Now it’s so much worse for young people. Everyone has a smartphone and it’s harder to be yourself and be free.
“I feel great. And they’re so worried about their brand, right?” she says. “It’s so weird. Even filtering your face and all that stuff.”
Dunst has resisted numerous attempts from those around her to alter how she looks. During the making of Spider-Man, a producer took her, without warning, to the dentist and encouraged her to get her teeth straightened. “I was like, ‘No, I like my teeth,’” she says. At the film’s London premiere, she wore dark lipstick and a black, punky Rodarte dress, and received some feedback from Sony, the studio who financed the movie. “The studio was like, ‘She looks very goth’. And they didn’t like that, probably because they wanted me to look like a sexy young woman who would appeal to a broader range of whoever gets seats in the theatre.” She took no notice. “I was never that girl. I never did it.”
Dunst credits her resilience in the face of this scrutiny in part to her relationship with Sofia Coppola, who cast her in The Virgin Suicides in the late ’90s. “I had Sofia [Coppola] at 16, who thought I was so cool and pretty when I didn’t. She was like, ‘I love your teeth!’”
It had a major impact on her, to have an older sister figure looking out for her whom she looked up to, and who could tell her, ‘You’re perfect as you are’. It helped her to ignore all of the other noise. “I didn’t realise at the time,” says Dunst. “I realised it [later] in decisions I had made. Not to change teeth, not to blow up my lips, or whatever it is that everyone wants to look like.
“I still know to this day, I’m not gonna screw up my face and look like a freak. You know what I mean? I’d rather get old and do good roles.”
I tell her that in my research, I came across a profile that was written about her in the early 2000s, right before Spider-Man came out, in which the writer called her “unformed” and a “giggly girl”, and seemed to criticise the breadth of her film knowledge. She was 19 at the time.
Dunst never looks back on any of that, but she remembers the difficulty of being a young woman in the spotlight at a time when talking about women in that way was run-of-the-mill. “Now, I can enjoy being an actress in this industry. But before, I felt insecure. I didn’t feel like I had a place.”
And she had her fair share of grim run-ins. There was the assistant director on Spider-Man who called her “girly girl” all throughout filming. It was meant as a joke, Dunst says, but it pissed her off. She worked with the same AD again on Civil War, 20 years later, and confronted him about it. “I was like, ‘It really bothered me that you guys did that,’” she says. “He was like, ‘I’m so sorry.’ Because they thought it was endearing. But it doesn’t sound endearing.”
Her worst experience, though, is one she doesn’t want to go into great detail about. “I had one director ask me something in a meeting for a movie that was inappropriate,” she says. “But I don’t want to put that negativity out there.” She was a teenager at the time. “It was really not a cool question to ask. You can only imagine. That was the worst thing that ever happened to me.” She immediately went and told her mother that she would not work with the director, whom she declines to name now. “I just am not going to put up with anything. You grow up and learn how to navigate it when people abuse power. But I never had anything truly horrendous happen to me. I was never put in rooms alone with someone that could do anything weird.”
There were other challenges. When she was coming up, there was a dearth of opportunities to get involved behind the camera – unlike today, when actors like Sydney Sweeney and Margot Robbie have made producing a major part of their careers and are reaping the benefits financially. (Robbie is said to have made $50m on Barbie alone, thanks largely to her producer credit.)
“I wish I would have been a producer on Bring It On, you know?” says Dunst. There she was taking a risk as an actress, bringing some needle-moving star power to a movie, and yet there were no conversations about her taking on that role – it just wasn’t a thing. “Nobody even thought to ask for that, and it was a huge success. And then I would have been a producer on all the other ones they made after that.” (The movie’s success led to six direct-to-video sequels, none of which featured any of the original cast.) “But I didn’t – it’s not like I’m getting anything from it.”
Twenty-odd years later, Dunst has seen every side of the film business, and she knows exactly which parts she wants to opt in and out of. She has a strong idea of the kinds of films she wants to work on, and she is happy to wait for them to come around. “I’d like to work with Paul Thomas Anderson. I’d like to work with Justine Triet. I want to work with filmmakers that want to make something that means something.”
(Three days after our interview, Dunst is pictured having a cigarette at the Oscars with Triet.)
She has plans to produce with Plemons, too. But she will never let the work consume her life. “I don’t have the drive to be on the phone all day,” she says. “This industry, it’s not a good industry. I’m just happy being with the people I love.”
Kirsten Dunst has an incredible ability to channel sadness in a look. It might be why so many celebrated filmmakers have centred her face in the frames of their films: if you stick the camera on her, your audience will feel what you need them to feel. As a clinically depressed bride in Lars von Trier’s end-of-the-world mindfuck, Melancholia, her eyes are vacant, like the light inside her has been cruelly snuffed out. In Civil War, as combat photographer Lee, she exhibits the deep weariness of someone who has stared directly into the dark heart of mankind. We see some of the atrocities she has witnessed first-hand: a man being set alight, children being murdered, a dumptruck full of bodies being emptied out into a pit. Dunst can carry that baggage in a single expression.
Garland says that Dunst brings a sense of lived experience to her roles that is hard to come by. “Because people have been aware of her since she was a child actor, you get this sense of someone who's lived a life,” he tells me. “It's not our experience of life – there's something off about it. She's gone off on her own into some strange landscape, which is obviously very different from being a combat photographer. But it's also, in its way, quite extreme, the environment she's existed in, and holding on to her sense of self within that environment.”
Does Dunst have any insight into how she communicates emotion in such a deep way on screen? “I guess I have some sad eyes. Or maybe I’ve seen some stuff, or I’m naughty. I don’t know,” she says. “I’m not a sad human being. But I’m a practical human being.”
Garland has a more generous answer: “With some people, the soul is deeply hidden. With Kirsten, it’s quite accessible.”
Dunst has tried a few different things to increase that accessibility. Never method acting, though. “What, am I gonna be like that with my kids when I come home? Speaking in an accent? Like, honestly, I can’t do that. It seems like something only men can afford to do.”
In Civil War, Dunst’s Lee is documenting the tail end of a conflict that has turned the United States into a harrowing war zone. “This movie is so terrifying and effective because it’s set in America, a place where you never feel like this could happen,” Dunst says.
There is little context given, but what we do know is: an authoritarian president (played by Nick Offerman) emerged, disbanded the FBI and authorised drone strikes against civilians. Then, a resistance army led by Texas and California staged a revolution. When we meet Lee and her colleagues – including Cailee Spaeny’s Jessie – they are racing to Washington, intent on landing an interview with the president.
There is no attempt to shroud the anxiety that has brought this film to life: that the rise of fascism and the ever-expanding gulf between left and right is hurtling us toward breaking point. Dunst watched it for the first time in a theatre alone with Plemons. “I was just so shook. I didn’t know what to do with myself,” she says. “The movie feels very real. It feels like a warning or a fable about what happens when the wrong people are in power.”
Plemons’ presence as a quiet, psychopathic soldier kicks the movie up about six notches. He wasn’t meant to appear in Civil War. But the actor Garland had in mind for a small part pulled out at the last minute, and Plemons was just “around”, so he stepped up. “I felt like he was doing us all a favour,” Dunst says.
Civil War is their third collaboration on screen, after Fargo, the TV series they met on in 2016, and The Power of the Dog. “Week two working on Fargo together, I told one of my best friends, ‘I will know him for the rest of my life,’” says Dunst. “He was just a soulmate of mine.”
Meeting at work was a blessing. “You get to be friends first, and it’s a deeper baseline from the beginning.
“We love working together,” she says. “I have so much respect for him. And he has so much respect for me. It’s a good balance – there’s no bullshit; whatever talks you need to have, it gets right to the realness.”
Unfortunately, Kirsten Dunst now has a headache. The margaritas are long gone. The bar is now full of parents and kids. I hand her a packet of ibuprofen and she pops two. “Talking about myself has literally given me a headache,” she says. “And I had therapy today, too. I’m talking too much.”
I suspect that at this point, wiping an ass is becoming preferable to answering another question about herself. But, lastly: a few things she’s mentioned, about the way filmmakers have tried to typecast her, and how the public has chewed up and spat out narratives about her, has given me a sense that she feels misunderstood. Does she?
“I don't know. Everyone's got to put their own opinion on you,” she says. “That's not really up to me to figure out or care about. Most people are projecting something. I have always pretty much been myself and I think that's maybe confusing people because I can't fake it.”
This is why she breaks these unspoken rules of Hollywood, telling you that most films these days aren’t good, and that everybody does superhero movies for the money. She doesn’t want or need to pretend.
She’s excited to get home; a playdate with her best friend’s children awaits. But this separation was nice while it lasted. “This is a vacation for me right now. I get to be here and have an adult conversation. If it has to come in the form of a GQ interview then I'll take it.
“I'm good. You know what I mean?”
Styling by Sean Knight
Tailoring by Marko Guillén
Hair by Owen Gould
Makeup by Melanie Inglessis
Nails by Yoko Sakakura
