We plebeians may never understand the relationship an actor has with the character he or she plays. After all, there probably aren’t real-life people—let alone fictional ones—for whom we would, say, starve ourselves and/or risk our psychological and physical well being, like these actors have heroically done. So it doesn’t sound altogether surprising that some actors, like Kirsten Dunst, have parting rituals for leaving their professional personas behind.

On Tuesday night, Dunst revealed her’s while speaking about her Fargo character, Peggy Blumquist, the ambitious small-town hairdresser who accidentally finds herself adding to the drama’s body count.

“That was one of the most intense characters I’ve ever played for sure,” Dunst told Jimmy Kimmel on Tuesday night. “And actually after I’m done with a role, sometimes I’ll, like, write a little note to myself to kind of sign out like, ‘O.K., stop acting like Peggy, Kirsten, or otherwise you might kill somebody!’”

She elaborated that the process, recommended to her by an acting peer, helps her let go of the characters in whom she’s immersed herself.

“I write like, ‘To Kirsten, you’re done now.’ Whatever in my words–I don’t want to give too much away [because the ritual is] very personal to me.” She doesn’t save the notes, though. “It’s more just like letting your unconscious know to let this go, basically. Like get this role out of your system now. . . . It’s like saying goodbye in your own way when something means a lot to you.”

The habit seems new, though. When Kimmel asked whether Dunst wrote letters a decade ago to Mary Jane Watson, her character from the Spider-Man films, the actress revealed that her primary concern back then was shedding the character’s primary physical characteristic ASAP.

“I wasn’t [writing letters] then,” Dunst said. “I was just like, ‘Get this red hair out. Make me a blond again!’”