Kirsten Dunst's new movie Civil War is released in NZ on April 11. Photo / AP
The former child star on movie industry predators, Tom Cruise’s kindness and being tormented by her husband in incendiary new film Civil War.
Kirsten Dunst is on a sofa in the West End of London, but her body clock is still somewhere above the Azores. The 41-year-old actress has jet-lag – and is clinging to the upholstery as if for dear life. First thing this morning she was talking to the BBC, but en route to elevenses with the Telegraph, she made a hotel pit stop to change from her more glamorous on-camera attire into a comfortable black blouse and trousers.
“I am going. To make. A cup. Of TEEEEEEEEA,” she says, very brightly and deliberately, and shuffles over to the kettle on the sideboard.
The star of Spider-Man, Marie Antoinette and Melancholia – about as wide-ranging a CV as the laws of spacetime allow – is in the UK for the launch of her new film Civil War. Two days earlier, she left her two boys at home in Los Angeles with their dad, the Killers of the Flower Moon actor Jesse Plemons, “and I boarded my flight to London thinking ‘way-hey!’ Then we landed, had our screening, all went out together for a nice dinner. And now…” She makes a long croaking noise, like a frog.
Not that her three-year break has been time off. Dunst gave birth to her second son James in May 2021 – who was conceived on the evening of the wrap party for her and Plemons’ first film together, The Power of the Dog. And nine months after that, she was filming Civil War in Atlanta, with James’ older brother Ennis, now nearly 6, sometimes visiting the set. Even so, Civil War’s release cinemas next week marks the end of Dunst’s longest break from our screens since the former child star was her eldest son’s age.
Written and directed by Britain’s Alex Garland, of 28 Days Later and Ex Machina, Civil War is a wildly thrilling and sickeningly plausible thriller about the violent near-future collapse of the United States. Dunst stars as Lee, a hard-nosed photojournalist who makes her way through scenes of surreal carnage and chaos.
As hinted by her name, her character was partly inspired by Lee Miller, the fearless model turned combat photographer who was famously snapped in Hitler’s bathtub during a 1945 assignment in Munich. But Dunst also drew inspiration from the war correspondent Marie Colvin, who was killed in Syria by Assad’s forces in 2012. What struck her most, Dunst says, “was that there was zero look-at-me in her. Zero. She did her job because she had to, and that was all there was to it.”
The hardships of war zone survival are worlds apart from Dunst’s own august career in cinema, which took her from Best Kiss at the MTV Awards (for Spider-Man) to Best Actress at Cannes (for Melancholia) in the space of eight years. But as a former child actress who shot her first breakfast cereal advert at the age of 3, she spent her first two decades navigating a very different sort of treacherous landscape.
Her early start in acting was thanks to her mother Inez, a former Lufthansa air stewardess whose own unpursued showbiz ambitions were nudged down a generation when strangers kept telling her how uncommonly bonny her daughter was. Dunst’s parents separated when she was 10, after which she moved with her mother and her elder brother from New Jersey to Los Angeles.
Back in the Spider-Man days, Dunst sometimes rued her mother’s pushiness. Right now, however, she’s just thankful that Inez was as committed to her daughter’s safety as she was her success.
“I was only able to avoid that predatory side of the business because wherever I went, my mother was literally always right there.”
When Dunst starred alongside Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt in Interview with the Vampire at the age of 11, she was “treated like a princess. Yes, it was a virtually all-male set, but everyone was very gentle and kind, and nothing ever felt weird. Brad was like an older brother to me.” (Notwithstanding their characters’ on-screen kiss, which a preteen Dunst once famously described as “gross”.)
“And then Tom – well, one morning around Christmas I remember going into my dressing room at Pinewood and he’d set up a beautiful tree in there for me, covered in ornaments.”
Her brush with the industry’s dark side came a few years later, when she was 16, and found herself in a very awkward conversation while auditioning for a sought-after role. “A male director had me in his office, by myself, and was asking me about this movie he wanted me for, and then, completely out of the blue, asked me this inappropriate question,” she recalls.
She declines to elaborate, or to name the culprit. “Honestly, I’m not even sure he’s still working any more,” she says. “It’s not something I like to reflect on. But I will say what he said was nothing to do with acting. And it wasn’t that what he said was just ‘a bit off’. It was totally improper. And I remember sitting there and knowing that something was wrong, but with no idea what I should do.”
After the audition, Dunst told her mother what had happened, “and that was the end of it. She withdrew me from the process and told them I wouldn’t be making the film.”
In the years ahead, an unflinchingly businesslike attitude became Dunst’s go-to tactic for staving off such unwanted advances. “I don’t give off that vibe,” she once told Sofia Coppola when the director asked if one of her male counterparts had ever “pounced on” Dunst on set.
In fact, it was meeting Coppola in her mid-teens, during the casting of 1999′s The Virgin Suicides, that gave her one of her steadiest friends and staunchest allies in the business.
“The way Sofia made me feel about how I looked on camera gave me so much confidence in my teenage years,” she remembers. “It’s a weird age to be working in Hollywood, and I know how rare and valuable it is to find that kind of mentor.” The pair made two more films together after that, Marie Antoinette and The Beguiled.
She also credits Coppola with instilling the confidence to turn down the various industry types who in the years ahead tried to persuade her to straighten her teeth – including a Spider-Man producer who had her physically driven to the dentist when she was 19 years old.
On that occasion, she refused to get out of the car, her natural smile survived – and of course, the film was all the better for it. Dunst’s Mary Jane Watson might have been countless millennial males’ dream teen crush, but the fact she wasn’t an impossible pin-up gave those early Spider-Man films a very human sensuality and warmth.
“All I can say is that when I was 19, I was not thinking in those terms at all,” says Dunst of that time.
Dunst has been around long enough to have seen Hollywood repeatedly shape-shift, but since the Spider-Man days, has anything meaningfully changed?
“The one big thing is the more open conversation around women’s pay,” she says. “When I was cast in Spider-Man, I had just had this big hit with Bring it On – so, you know, I was actually bringing something to the table. But I had no awareness of that, nor even that the fact I was being paid much, much less than Tobey [Maguire, her co-star] might be unfair. So it wasn’t as if I was turning up to the set every day feeling bad about it. It was just something no one even thought to question.”
Nor did she bristle when the crew referred to her on set – affectionately if demeaningly – as “girly-girl”, rather than by name.
Her first inkling that something might be amiss came during the promotional campaign for the sequel. “They put out the poster, and mine was the only visible face on it, because Tobey was in costume. And I was like, ‘hang on a minute, I’m a selling point.’”
The first flush of stardom that followed was, she says, “unusual, in that I was still discovering who I was as I went along”. There was a whirl of celebrity boyfriends, including Jake Gyllenhaal, Garrett Hedlund and Razorlight frontman Johnny Borrell, as well as roles in huge romantic comedies like Wimbledon and Elizabethtown.
Indeed, it was her character in the latter that prompted the critic Nathan Rabin to coin the term Manic Pixie Dream Girl to refer to the quirky-but-beautiful young female love objects that had started cropping up everywhere in noughties American romcoms.
“But I was never happy playing ‘in love’,” she says. “I hate it. It’s so boring. There were so many of those films being made at the time, and I did quite a few of them – and the non-traditional spins, like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, those were great. But the roles I felt unhappy with were the ones that felt contrived.”
Ironically, it was while playing one half of a married couple that she met Plemons, who in 2015 was cast as her husband in the second season of the dark comic thriller series Fargo. As Peggy and Ed Blumquist, two eccentric Minnesotans who get caught up in a criminal turf war, the two had obvious chemistry, and Dunst describes their relationship as “falling in love creatively first – it’s having that feeling of freedom when you’re acting with someone that they’re so in the moment with you that it doesn’t feel like you’re acting at all.”
They got together the following spring, but until recently had only acted together again one more time, for Jane Campion in The Power of the Dog, from which his-and-hers Oscar nominations resulted.
But after one of Civil War’s original cast had to drop out from a small but crucial role – a psychopathic loyalist soldier Lee and her colleagues meet on the road – Dunst suggested her other half as a possible replacement.
“I mean, it was an irresistible deal,” she laughs. “No additional hotel or transport costs. Plus he is very good.” Didn’t she find it strange or uncomfortable being tormented by a loved one on camera? “I honestly didn’t think of it like that,” she shrugs. “Acting’s acting. It doesn’t all come from within. He’s one of the kindest people I know.”
She’s proud of Civil War – “It’s a warning, and I hope it gets people talking” – although notes that this is the first time one of her personal favourites has been met with a largely positive first wave of reviews. The Virgin Suicides and Marie Antoinette, her films with Coppola, took a while to become cult classics.
But usefully today’s tastemakers are the kids who once thrilled at that upside-down kiss, and had Bring it On posters Blu-tacked to their bedroom walls.
Does that worry her? “Maybe it should,” she laughs, after draining her last drop of tea. “But I’m enjoying not having to tell myself, ‘They’ll like this later.’”
Civil War is in NZ cinemas from Thursday April 11.
From where to get the best view to when the roads will close.