Kirsten Dunst is good at intimacy, professionally and personally. We are having lunch to talk about her heart-rending performance in Jane Campion’s film The Power of the Dog, an epic examination of fragility and dominance in the desolate American Midwest, where Dunst’s soft prettiness cannot protect her from the emotional violence of her brother-in-law, played by Benedict Cumberbatch. But for at least the first ten minutes of the interview we talk about breast size and breastfeeding. “I stopped at three months because otherwise I would not be able to do any of this,” she says, swirling her hands at the swanky hotel restaurant, her hair and make-up immaculate, her grey cashmere Prada coat slung over the back of the chair. “I mean, I already have nice-size breasts, so can you imagine them filled with milk? I wouldn’t be able to get dressed, I lived in a robe. But then when you stop, your hormones … you feel so bad.”
It is this sort of uninhibited honesty, delivered with a sly, dimpled smile, that makes Dunst, 39, so compelling to watch, as well as fun to share a club sandwich with. She is in London for just a few days. Her younger son, James, six months, and his brother, Ennis, three, are in America with their father, the actor Jesse Plemons, who has twice played Dunst’s husband, in The Power of the Dog and in the second series of Fargo, where they met in 2015.
“I didn’t think love right away. Although one of my best friends told me that I’d said to her, after about two weeks of knowing him, ‘I will know him for the rest of my life.’ There was an immediate soul connection.”
It is an irony that the couple, who live in Los Angeles in a gorgeous ranch-style house, which is the social hub for their friends, have yet to marry in real life, although Dunst does wear an impressive antique diamond engagement ring from Fred Leighton. “I would marry him tomorrow. We want a proper wedding, we just haven’t had the time. And I wanted to have fun at my wedding and not pay for everyone else to celebrate while I am pregnant and waddling down the aisle.”
The couple’s connection — “He is like me in the way he likes to work and the way we approach things on set, we are very similar just in our beings” — is not so surprising considering they both started appearing in TV advertisements aged three. And now they have their own three-year-old. Would they put Ennis on screen? “I mean, I get it. If he wants to try and it’s natural, like if Sofia [Coppola] was doing something, why not? I am not going to take him on auditions, although both Jesse’s and my mother are dying to take him out. It’s what my mum did with me and what Jesse’s mum did with him. We won’t let them. We joke about it, like, ‘You guys should start a children’s agency.’ And they’re like, ‘But he has the dimples — this kid would kill it at commercials!’ To prove the grandmothers’ point, Dunst shows me a picture on her phone of her delightful little blond boy, and another of the brothers together. “He is massive,” she says of the baby. “He is very happy, he doesn’t cry.” You do get the sense that Dunst would rather be there with them than here, although she would never be so ungracious as to say it. “Listen, it is pretty weird to go from that to this. I mean, it could not be more different. It is nice to be part of a Jane Campion movie and look nice, get out of the house and talk to people about film and not about what snack do you want me to get you. It’s good for my brain.”
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Dunst’s father is German and her mother is of Swedish and German descent; she grew up in New Jersey until the family moved to LA when she was about ten. She was first on a film set aged six, when she was in Woody Allen’s segment of New York Stories, and has worked pretty much nonstop ever since. “But I always went to normal schools, I never missed out on anything — friends’ birthdays, Halloween, prom. I didn’t feel Shirley Temple’d. It was really fun.” She won her first big role aged 11, as Claudia, the tiny vampire with a big appetite and perfect ringlets in Interview with the Vampire, opposite Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt. “They treated me like I was a princess, and then I did Little Women, with all these amazing female actresses … ” Claire Danes, Winona Ryder and Susan Sarandon.
But the most important woman Dunst met in those early years was Sofia Coppola, ten years her senior, also a Hollywood alumna. Coppola cast Dunst as Lux Lisbon in The Virgin Suicides, which, with its sleepy, sexy, summer-bleached aesthetic and Air soundtrack was one of the defining cinematic moments of the late Nineties. “Being 16, with a woman directing me, it was such an impressionable time for me. That’s the age where you feel shitty about yourself, insecure, and Sofia made me feel really beautiful. At 16 she gave me a confidence that I could carry with me when I worked with other directors. So I wasn’t looking for their approval, I didn’t feel like I had to dress sexy for premieres. I felt like, ‘Oh, Sofia thinks I am beautiful.’ ” It was Coppola who persuaded Dunst not to get her teeth — those cute incisors — fixed.
Dunst’s career continued apace. She was in Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man reboot in 2002 with Tobey Maguire, kick-starting the current superhero domination of our screens; and in between that film and Raimi’s two Spider-Man sequels, starred in Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, with its punk sensibility and excess of macarons. At the time the film was not critically acclaimed but has since found a wider appreciation, its influence clearly visible in shows like Bridgerton and the recent The Pursuit of Love TV adaptation. “People didn’t like that we used modern music,” she says. “But it was supposed to be a feeling, an essence of Marie Antoinette. It was ahead of its time. If that came out now we would probably be having a great time celebrating it.”
In her mid-twenties Dunst began to get a reputation as a hard-living party girl, dating the Razorlight frontman Johnny Borrell and becoming a fixture on the nightclub scene. It was also at this time that she started to get overwhelmed by feelings of depression, brought on by the relentless pressures of her work and the criticism. “I feel like most people around 27, the shit hits the fan. Whatever is working in your brain, you can’t live like that any more mentally.
I feel like I was angry.” She tried to ignore the feelings, to maintain a façade. “You don’t know that you are repressing all this anger, it wasn’t a conscious thing.” Eventually she checked into a rehab centre in Utah, citing depression rather than drugs or alcohol. “It’s hard to talk about such a personal thing, but it is important to share too. All I’ll say is that medication is a great thing and can really help you come out of something. I was afraid to take something and so I sat in it for too long. I would recommend getting help when you need it.”
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That darkness, and the experience of working through it, transformed her — “You become a different person, you grow up” — and inevitably fed into her work. It equipped her to make the Lars von Trier film Melancholia not long afterwards, a role for which she won the best actress award at Cannes. “I was in the best place of my life making Melancholia, you don’t want to be depressed playing a depressed person!”
It was also while Dunst was in her twenties that Campion first got in touch, writing her a letter. “It was about the possibility of working together. And I was like, ‘Wow, I want to work with this woman.’ I mean, Holly Hunter in The Piano, Kate Winslet in Holy Smoke, these are performances I look up to as a performer. I still have that letter in my phone … ” The strange pace of Hollywood meant that it would be more than a decade before the women realised their ambition to collaborate. “I would have played any role for Jane,” Dunst says. The role she has ended up playing, Rose, was one of a woman out of place in a harsh world. “It’s not a fun role to play. For me it is an old place of feelings, like feeling really bad about yourself and really insecure, and it is just like a painful place.” But she gave it her all, making Rose raw and real, her destruction a painful spectacle to witness. And fortunately, away from the set, Dunst got to enjoy living in New Zealand with her son and partner.
And then Covid struck. “We would go to the grocery store and take off our clothes and wipe down afterwards. No one knew anything, it was terrifying, and at the time I smoked so I was like, ‘Oh my God, if I get this I am gonna die.’” The film eventually got finished, despite stops and starts, and on the night of the wrap party, Dunst conceived her second baby. “I was like, as soon as we are done with this movie, let’s try and have another baby.”
Dunst finds herself faced with the same dilemma as many other women of her age, her child-rearing years overlapping with the moment when she is really stepping into her power professionally. The summer was “full on”. Plemons injured his leg just before the new baby was born. “So I had to do everything”, with only friends and family to help. At the same time, Dunst’s career is on a high, her performance in The Power of the Dog hailed as an Oscar contender (“long overdue”, says The New York Times). But these two states don’t always have to be preclusive. Motherhood isn’t just exhausting, it can also be creative, inspiring, transformative.
“I remember feeling really free after having my [first] son,” Dunst says. “I think as a performer you put yourself out there more [after having a child]. You put yourself on the line because you have nothing to lose. It doesn’t really matter. And to show everything of yourself is a brave thing and a beautiful thing.”
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The Power of the Dog is in cinemas from November 19 and on Netflix from December 1
Styling: Verity Parker. Hair: David Harborow at Streeters using Hair by Sam McKnight. Make-up: Mary Wiles at Tracey Mattingly using Kat Burki. Nails: Michelle Humphrey at LMC Worldwide using Bio Sculpture. Local production: The Production Factory
