キルステン・ダンストは私たちの目の前で成長した

This story is taken from the Autumn/Winter 2025 issue of AnOther Magazine: 

The mercury is creeping past 35C on a cloudless morning in Toluca Lake, a serene enclave built on peach and walnut groves in the San Fernando Valley. This side of LA might not get breezy westerlies off the Pacific but it’s a little less self-conscious of its status, and that suits Kirsten Dunst – “Kiki” to her friends. She walks into her local brunch spot with her hair still wet from the backyard sprinklers her sons have been playing in to fend off the summer heat. “I lived in the Hills for a while after Spider-Man, when I thought that was what you were supposed to do,” she says as we join the queue for iced coffee. “But I like that it’s low-key here. It’s not ‘cool’.” Her neighbourhood rose up in the 1920s, prized for its proximity to the Universal and Warner Bros studios – Dunst points out a tavern opposite that once served cocktails to the Rat Pack, resurrected by Quentin Tarantino for Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood, and the mid-century diner down the block where she drank milkshakes as a teenager beneath walls patchworked by photographs of Golden Age stars.

There have been Tribeca-loft years and stretches in London, but the 43-year-old has always gravitated back to the Valley since she and her mother flew in from New Jersey in 1992 for pilot season. That year Dunst made it past multiple auditions, screen tests and pint-sized rivals to win a role for the ages: the cherub-faced bloodsucker in pink satin shoes who slices Tom Cruise’s throat in Interview with the Vampire. Three decades later, she has made a very public journey from dimpled child walking the red carpet in knee-high socks and jellies via the American sweetheart whose sunny exterior was undercut by choppier waters, to today’s versatile, virtuoso performer with a streak of auteur-driven, break-your-heart performances that hinge on the cartography of her face. “I grew up as I was doing this – I didn’t know what I liked in film as a kid,” she says. “I had to figure out my own taste, learn all my lessons along the way.” Her more than 70 roles to date have encompassed springy cheerleaders and catatonically depressed brides, haunted Southern belles and minimum-wage Florida firecrackers, indulged queens and battle-weary photojournalists, the connective tissue between them a bone-deep lived-in quality and her gift for projecting multiplicities with a look. There’s also the snaggletooth smile, saved from a Hollywood dentist by Sofia Coppola, who told her 27 years ago that her gently skewed incisors shouldn’t be fixed.

“Well, this is very LA, he’s reading a scene,” Dunst murmurs as we find a table, indicating a man in Ray-Bans nearby underscoring a script with a Sharpie. Later, when a rangy group of guys slump into chairs behind us talking at full volume, her radar is up again – “Look at bro zone over here! It’s like we’re all hanging out in their living room.” Dunst is an inveterate, magpie-eyed observer, a quality that must have served her well during her most recent shoot, with Ruben Östlund. The Swedish provocateur’s latest discomfiting thought experiment, The Entertainment System Is Down, imagines what hell might be unleashed on a long-haul if the in-flight entertainment failed, dooming passengers to 22 hours of each other’s company. With an airplane’s hierarchy governing everything from leg space to mini pretzels, it’s rich territory for a director ruthless at stripping away our surface civility to expose all the pettiness and cruelty crawling underneath. It’s no spoiler to say the plane will go down; Östlund has promised it will and also threatened a scene in which absolutely nothing happens for 15 minutes.

“He’s such an anthropologist of human behaviour, of the nuances of interaction,” Dunst says, splitting a saucer-sized cookie and offering me half. “It’s funny you mention Interview with the Vampire because I haven’t been this excited to get a role since then. And I had to audition for it – everyone did.” (Her co-stars include Keanu Reeves, Samantha Morton and Daniel Brühl.) In hers, Dunst improvised her character, Victoria, unlocking her fiancée’s phone and discovering he’s been serially unfaithful. “Then we Zoomed and I thought Ruben wanted to improvise with me. I was terrified, speed-talking and sweating, but he just said, ‘So I want to make sure you’re comfortable with nudity and my process of 20-plus takes.’ I was like, ‘Ruben, I’ll do whatever to be in your movie.’”

On set inside a retired and reassembled Boeing 747 in Budapest, with 150 extras filling the seats, Dunst experienced the director’s notorious process of ferreting out our underlying impulses in take after take. “He hits this gong on the last take – he definitely has a method. I don’t need that method to give a good performance, but it gave us the opportunity to try so many things,” she says. “We’re in a tiny space, with this camera programmed by remote, so the timing had to be like a ballet dance. We’d do a scene and then Ruben would add champagne popping in the background, or a crying baby, or throw in a dog, or a bag of trash … Everything was set up as this perfect disaster of how people look on a plane – we’re greasy, red, gross, coffee spilled over us … He wanted it as real as possible.”

“I grew up as I was doing this … I had to figure out my own taste, learn all my lessons along the way” – Kirsten Dunst

Dunst’s lack of vanity in front of the lens chimes with some of her favourite performances – Ellen Burstyn in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, say, or Gena Rowlands in Opening Night. She is similarly unprecious about her screentime, choosing quality directors over quantity of lines. She only needed to hear the name Derek Cianfrance, known for his searing portrait of a marriage’s implosion, Blue Valentine, and gritty father-son fable The Place Beyond the Pines, to sign on for his latest. “If Derek sent me the menu for this restaurant, I’d do it,” she says. “He gets the most natural performances and a lot of times it’s the first take. He likes when things feel alive and there’s mistakes, and the way he edits, it feels like all the real stuff – the life stuff.” Roofman is based on the true story of wayward military-trained thief Jeffrey Manchester (played by Channing Tatum), who was imprisoned after a spree of McDonald’s heists and later escaped to hide out for months in a North Carolina Toys R Us. The director cast Dunst as a single-mother employee at the store who’s swept into the felon’s orbit. “I grew up being in awe of Kirsten,” Cianfrance says over the phone from New York. “She takes over the screen – you can’t stop looking at her. I cast the real police officers involved, so here are these cops doing a scene with this Hollywood actor and Kirsten is so salt of the earth, with this incredible ability to connect. Watching them be floored by the truth she gave is something I’ll never forget.”

To attune herself to the precise weather of her characters’ moods, Dunst creates playlists; for Roofman, they spanned a mix of Lee Hazlewood, Nina Simone, Dolly Parton – and Ed Sheeran. “My character is a strong Southern woman but she falls for this guy pretty quickly. So I had to find my inner cheesy romantic. Because I’m not a girl who looks at someone’s bod and goes, ‘Ooh, he’s in shape. He’s hot.’ That doesn’t really do it for me. So, one thing I did was always do a take like I was making a Christmas movie. If we did a Christmas take of our interview, we’d add this little sparkle, right? I have a very dark sense of humour, so I needed a less-jaded part of myself. I’m pretty open but the real me would be, ‘Seriously, what are you doing with this weird dude who doesn’t call you?’”

On set in the fake Toys R Us one day, Dunst noticed something familiar among the giant teddy bears, figurines and chewy sweets lining the shelves: a 16 inch model of herself in the role that made her blockbuster-famous. “There were MJ dolls – me falling off the balcony in Spider-Man,” she says with a laugh. “Actually, I brought those back for my kids.” At four, her younger son is already a year older than Dunst was when she signed to Ford Models and began travelling into New York with her hair in curlers to shoot Macy’s catalogues.

She was born in Point Pleasant on the New Jersey shore to an American mother with Swedish and German roots and a German father. Inez was a flight attendant, Klaus was a medical services executive, and some recipe of her mother’s gregariousness and her father’s work ethic found its way into their first child, who seems to have been born with her foot on the pedal. She booked the first commercial she auditioned for, aged three, and almost 100 followed: Kix cereal, Crayola, Pillsbury, a doll with nylon hair that grew with a pump of its arm, a soft toy kitten that purred. She was an incorrigible performer – a kid who loved The Wizard of Oz but also did a decent impression of Axl Rose, and regularly corralled cousins into staging makeshift plays at family dinners. “I see it in my younger son – he’s a natural comedian,” Dunst says. “My mom’s pushing me in the cart at the grocery store in New Jersey and people were like, ‘Your daughter’s funny, she’s cute, you should take her to an audition.’ That’s how it started – my parents figured they’d put money away for college. I was booking things easily and having fun.”

She graduated to film roles at seven – as Mia Farrow’s daughter in Woody Allen’s segment of the 1989 anthology New York Stories, and then as Tom Hanks’s daughter in Brian De Palma’s Wall Street takedown, The Bonfire of the Vanities. But it was Claudia and her unquenchable bloodlust in Interview with the Vampire that upended her life. On location in New Orleans with Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt, Dunst would be woken at 3pm to do her schoolwork before fitting her acrylic fangs for the nocturnal shoots. Entire lessons with her acting coach were devoted to slamming doors to channel the unbridled fury of an ages-old vampire maddeningly trapped in the body of a ringletted girl, condemned to frilly dresses for eternity. Dunst was fiery-eyed and fearless on camera, her preternatural ability to shift between innocence and scheming maturity no small feat for a child still so young her mother covered her eyes during much of the premiere. When critics compared Dunst to Tatum O’Neal in Paper Moon and Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver, and she was nominated for a Golden Globe, it was clear she’d be leaving New Jersey behind. The family, including younger brother Christian, checked into Oakwood apartments, a well-trodden complex for out-of-town child actors a few minutes’ drive from where we are now. Her straight-talking agent, Iris Burton, a former chorus girl with a barracuda reputation and River Phoenix and Drew Barrymore on her books, liked to warn stage parents to squirrel money away for the moment their offspring morphed into camera-unfriendly teens. No such fate awaited Dunst. As if to underline her elevation to Hollywood royalty, she began receiving what is known in her household as “the Cruise cake”: a white chocolate coconut gateau that has arrived every Christmas for three decades from her Vampire co-star.

In the early years, Dunst’s mother supervised her carousel of auditions and crisscrossed the country for her daughter’s film roles. (Dunst’s parents separated soon after her move to the West Coast.) Through the Nineties that included swatting gigantic mosquitoes with a tennis racket in Jumanji; playing precocious Amy March in Little Women opposite Susan Sarandon and Winona Ryder; and sharing the screen with Dustin Hoffman and Robert De Niro in the needle-sharp political satire Wag the Dog. These days, Inez lives in Dunst’s guesthouse and they’ve maintained a close relationship. Still, the everyday preoccupations of adolescence and the sleepless demands of Hollywood weren’t always aligned. “There were times during my teenage years where I would not want to be working and I was,” Dunst remembers. “I think every child actor goes through some complicated relationship with what they’re doing.” She was enrolled at a private Catholic school, switching between studying with a tutor and returning to class once she’d wrapped a film. “That also gave me anxiety, because I’d forgotten my locker code or which lunch table I sat at. I don’t want my kids to have that sense of unbelonging, of not knowing what the jokes are. I made myself small at school because I didn’t want to be called out as ‘that actress’, or as bitchy, you know? I didn’t want to be a target in high school.”

Those knotty emotions, magnified by the visibility of her burgeoning career, made Dunst a cosmic match for a director who has captured girlhood in flux like no one else. In 1998, Sofia Coppola met up with Dunst in Toronto, where she was filming, and presented her with her script of Jeffrey Eugenides’ novel The Virgin Suicides, the tale of a dreamy clan of sisters cloistered in Seventies suburbia, entrancing and unfathomable to the boys next door. The pair hit it off (“We’re both just very porous people,” Dunst says) and they shot it that summer on a shoestring, with Dunst as free-spirited Lux Lisbon. In her tube tops and Dr Scholl’s, the name of her crush felt-tipped on her underwear, Lux became a lightning rod for every girl accelerating towards womanhood with the gnawing premonition that prize might be a cruel trick. Today, the cult film continues to cast its spell on new generations, referenced on the runway and in academic theses, in pop lyrics and memes and “Which Lisbon Sister Are You?” quizzes.

The experience was transformative for Dunst too: “I was seen through Sofia’s eyes as a 16-year-old who was becoming a woman,” she says. “Nobody else wanted to see me that way. I got to play a role that was more about my sexuality in a beautiful way that wasn’t creepy, you know? With Sofia I could express things that were happening internally that I didn’t feel like I could express in my life.” Lux became defining for her: whether it’s suburban Detroit, the Montana badlands or the court of Versailles, the ticking time-bomb tension between a character’s desires and the world she’s trapped in will forever be associated with Dunst. It lit the fuse on a creative partnership that continues today – she and Coppola have a fourth project simmering: “My most trusted collaborator and little sister,” the director said of Dunst at the 2019 ceremony that etched her an overdue star on the Walk of Fame.

“With Sofia [Coppola] I could express things that were happening internally that I didn’t feel like I could express in my life” – Kirsten Dunst 

As she rode a wave of smart teen movies – the cheerleading caper Bring It On, cut-throat comedy Drop Dead Gorgeous, and later, Spider-Man, playing Peter Parker’s girl next door – Dunst had her north star. “The way Sofia respected me meant that going into the future from The Virgin Suicides, if a director said certain things to me, I’d think, ‘Hm, that’s lame.’ Because I had this internal touchstone in Sofia, who I thought – still think – is one of the coolest people in the world.” Tobey Maguire had driven past Dunst building-high in a Gap ad on Sunset and been prompted to suggest her as his web slinger’s love interest; the resulting trilogy they went on to make with Sam Raimi grossed $2.5 billion at the box office, launched the modern era of the superhero film, created the upsidedown kiss of the century and immortalised Dunst in those plastic figures her children now play with. With her jewel of a performance in Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Dunst was the queen of both multiplex and arthouse by her mid-twenties – the A-lister whose go-to Halloween costume was Charlotte Rampling in the cult Seventies thriller The Night Porter.

At Cannes in 1999 – and despite Faye Dunaway’s mobile phone going off in the middle of the premiere – The Virgin Suicides was lauded by European critics. Dunst and Coppola’s second collaboration, the impressionistic candy-coloured confection Marie Antoinette, wasn’t – at first. In her screenplay, Coppola described her vision as “a gold-plated Versailles hangover of a memory of a lost girl” and Dunst instinctively caught the mood, playing it as a history of feelings rather than facts. Her ill-fated queen is a genuine teenager: rebellious, a little giddy and tragically naive amid the Versailles piranha pool, self-medicating with clothes, shoes and macarons after being married off at 14. A certain breed of Cannes critic balked at the irreverent historical licence and misread Coppola’s focus on superficialities as surface itself. Back then, Dunst described that reaction as “kind of like everyone was stomping on my heart”. Today, we’re in the throes of a full-circle rehabilitation. “All these new historical dramas that have more of a modern twist – that’s pretty much because of Sofia, I think,” she says. “She had such a voice early on that people were threatened by.” Until next spring, the V&A are displaying Dunst’s costumes – including the shoes Manolo Blahnik made by hand in Lyon silks – as part of an exhibition on the bad girl of France. “You know I still have Jason Schwartzman’s sleep shirt from Marie Antoinette?” she says, laughing. “Probably because they wouldn’t give me anything else.”

By 25, the actor had been catapulted to the heights of her profession. But sometime around the close of the Spider-Man trilogy, she found herself depleted. It’s been oft recorded that she checked into a centre in Utah to deal with a period of depression – perhaps a debt called in for almost two and a half decades on camera. “It’s a hard industry,” she says now. “It sets actors up for a really unhealthy relationship with self-confidence, where you don’t have boundaries. In order to put your guts out there you have to take care of yourself, big time. I’m learning that the older I get – to hold my boundaries and make it for myself, not make it about pleasing anybody else.”

On her return from Utah, she reshuffled the deck and began to shape her instinctual gifts into a formidable instrument. Beside her was a new accomplice, the acting coach she still works with today: “I tried one script on tons of different teachers and Greta Seacat was the one,” she says. “For a lot of acting teachers, I feel like it’s about punishment, weirdly. But acting should be about release. It should be cathartic, get something out of you – nobody should be punished for this.” 

A startling example of Dunst’s sense of reinvigoration was the blistering performance she delivered in Lars von Trier’s end-of-the-world drama Melancholia (2011) – frequently cited as one of the best films of the 21st century and certainly the greatest about depression. Dunst’s electrifying Justine, alternately glassy-eyed and ferocious, was born from Dunst’s own experience. “She has the advantage of having had a depression of her own. All sensible people have,” von Trier said at the time. “I smile and I smile and I smile,” Dunst monotones as the unravelling bride, gripped by a despair so raw that the apocalypse, in the shape of a crimson planet on a collision course with Earth, comes as the lifting of a curse. Over the night of her ill-starred wedding she pees on the golf course, has sex with a stranger in a sand bunker and soaks in a bathtub while her guests wait uneasily on the floor below. But in contrast to the pitch-darkness of that role, the bright yellow chiffon cocktail dress Dunst wore to her Cannes photocalls had the suggestion of a light bulb switched back on. It was a mark of how undeniable her performance was that, despite von Trier’s disastrous comment on the Nazis during a press conference, she left the Croisette with the best actress award.

From that point on, Dunst has harnessed her subconscious to immerse herself in the eddies and flows of her characters’ inner lives. She’ll do the practical work – learn to play the piano or ride the horse – but it’s in her dreaming life that her characters truly germinate. One example of that is on display in the second series of Fargo, featuring Dunst as the unhinged Peggy Blumquist, a Minnesota hairdresser who launches a trail of slaughter when she hits a crime family’s prodigal son with her Chevrolet Corvair. Dunst says she dreamed about ScoobyDoo, and so a little of that scamper found its way into Peggy’s walk. Fargo marked her first recurring TV role since she’d played a teen sex worker at 14, opposite George Clooney in ER. As Peggy, Dunst nailed the comic tone without letting us forget the wrench of her disappointment in the too-small life she shares with her homey husband, the tragicomedy of her hopeful blue eyeshadow and beret entirely unsuited to midwinter Minnesota. (Dunst’s grandmother hailed from a farm in the state, so the cheerful lilt of that accent is in her DNA.)

The series brought Dunst Emmy and Golden Globe nominations, and an onscreen husband, Jesse Plemons, who became her offscreen one too. The Friday Night Lights and Breaking Bad actor turned Scorsese, Spielberg and Yorgos Lanthimos favourite met Dunst in the queue at LAX on the way to Canada for Fargo. The shoot entailed five snowbound months in Calgary, and Dunst, wanting Peggy to be “a bit meat and potatoes”, stayed in with Plemons, ate pizza and binge-watched Friday Night Lights. “It was freezing in Calgary and there was nothing to do except hang out with Jesse, my future husband,” she says. “We became such good friends. We had so much dialogue in Fargo – we rehearsed a lot so that we could feel free together, throw it all away and be present.”

Both share the singular experience of growing up a child actor (and making it out the other side). Plemons’s family were extras in the westerns shot near his one traffic-light hometown of Mart, Texas – he got his start twirling a rodeo rope aged three in a Coke commercial. “Jesse is a very present actor – I like people who are just as present as me. That’s what makes it not feel like acting,” Dunst says. “Working with him was like being two dancers – when they’re great together, they fly – you feel like you’re watching something else entirely. With Jesse I feel like I’m reaching another level of what I do.”

“It’s a hard industry. It sets actors up for a really unhealthy relationship with self-confidence, where you don’t have boundaries” – Kirsten Dunst 

They married at GoldenEye in Jamaica and have two sons, Ennis and James – meaning Dunst was a sleep-deprived new mother when she played a sleep-deprived new mother in the series On Becoming a God in Central Florida (2019), a gallows-humour take on the curdling American Dream. Dunst is so effective at hushed performances – see her lonely teacher in Coppola’s candlelit gothic drama The Beguiled, aching for a life beyond the schoolhouse – it’s easy to forget the unruly, anarchic energy she can wield (remember the vicious comedy Bachelorette?). As the loquacious Krystal Stubbs, a waterpark employee fighting the stacked odds of a shady pyramid scheme, she tears down an Orlando drag on a Barbie-pink quad bike with her baby strapped to her chest. “It was exhausting because Krystal doesn’t stop talking. But I wanted to work so badly,” she says of her Golden Globe-nominated performance. “Being a new mom, I could mine a lot of frustrations for that role.”

The series was streaming, with Dunst spray-tanned and dressed in acid-washed double denim, when Jane Campion offered her a role that was Krystal’s polar opposite. The uncompromising filmmaker had wanted to work with Dunst since The Virgin Suicides. “There is something genuinely haunting about her physical beauty and sweetness contradicting a certain darkness that Kirsten can access,” she writes over email. “As an audience you feel constantly torn about wanting the pretty sweet world but recognising it is a mirage.” The beleaguered widow that Dunst went on to play in Campion’s epic psychodrama The Power of the Dog harnesses that dark and light. Her character, Rose, who marries Plemons’s solid rancher only to have her psyche shattered by his vindictive brother (Benedict Cumberbatch), is a broken doll: falteringly applied lipstick, pale ill-fitting dresses, sentences rambly from the gin bottles hidden under her pillow. (Years before, on Drop Dead Gorgeous, Allison Janney had shown Dunst a way of spinning around in circles before the camera rolls to get that unsteady, drunken gait.) On location under roomy skies in New Zealand, she deliberately didn’t talk before a scene to get a lump in her throat – and she and Cumberbatch didn’t speak at all off set. The collaboration with Campion was Dunst’s “lightning in a bottle” moment, the culmination of a lifetime’s screen experience. “Kirsten is a truth machine, says it all, and she’s so funny, quick and kind,” Campion continues. “After she saw the film, she sent me a message saying I was going to get ‘a lot of shrimps for this’. I was pretty confused, but she assured me shrimps were good.” There was indeed a gumbo of shrimps, including an Oscar for Campion, and Academy nominations for Dunst and Plemons – firsts for both. The snap of husband and wife cutting loose in the Oscars’ smoking area that night with the French nominees for Anatomy of a Fall said it all.

During The Power of the Dog, Dunst imagined her onscreen son had killed his father, to stitch their mother-son dynamic with a tighter thread. She likes an unspoken backstory; in last year’s Civil War, as a photojournalist hardened by unconscionable horrors, she suggested to Cailee Spaeny, who plays her protégée, that they were actually mother and daughter, to complicate the interplay of friction and protectiveness. That film, set in a dystopian America of torched strip malls and factional, impetuous violence, was a reminder that few actors can convey emotional baggage behind their eyes like Dunst. “I was kind of playing the director, Alex Garland, who grew up in that world. But I did dreamwork for that to get a bit of a blasé, masculine feeling in my body,” she says, jumping up and doing a slouchy, weighted walk. “I am never going to say who I thought of in my dream – it’s so funny I can’t believe it, but it worked.” If she puts up no walls between herself and her characters though, when the time comes to eject them, her method is surprisingly simple. “I write myself a letter,” she says, bringing up the one she wrote after Östlund’s shoot. “It goes, ‘Dear Inner Self, please sign me out of Victoria and into my true essence so I may be happy, joyous and free. With love and respect, Kirsten.’”

Counting Plemons’s blood-chilling Civil War cameo in red-tinted shades, the couple have now worked together three times. “And no duds yet! Javier Bardem and Penélope Cruz, they do it,” she says. “Next I want us to play a really obnoxious couple, where you’re like, these people are total assholes. We’ll get in really good shape and I’ll get something that wouldn’t suit me at all, like long hair extensions and blown-up lips, if you can reverse that.” (There’s nothing wrong with those things, she says, just that they’d “look really weird on me”.) For now, she and Plemons are alternating film and parenting duties: he is up next, heading to Berlin to play Plutarch Heavensbee, the late Philip Seymour Hoffman’s role, in The Hunger Games prequel. “And I’m with the kids,” she says. “I’m a breakfast mom – pancakes and bacon for dinner.”

The family’s 1930s ranch house, shared with assorted cats and dogs, is lovingly filled with art and keepsakes: a painting of Marie Antoinette in glazed pink by Elizabeth Peyton; a small wooden bird given to Dunst by Campion; a model ship built by her grandfather, a speed-skating champ; the antique mirror Dunst danced in front of as a child; a door that used to live in Jackie O’s New York apartment; and numerous musical instruments belonging to Plemons, whose name has just popped up on her phone, calling to offer her a lift home. Dunst decides she has time to walk, since the kids are at soccer practice. “I enjoyed talking to you,” she says. “I always worry, what is this going to be like? I’ve never gotten used to interviews – talking about yourself isn’t fun and I’m just not a big talker. I’m pretty quiet really.”

In recent years, though, Dunst has been beloved for her frankness – not only for calling out the gender pay gap, the crew member who called her “girly-girl”, or the “sad mom” roles she’s offered, but for the way her responses don’t feel second-guessed. In 40 hard-won years in the business she has never let it mould her, carving her own path towards the original thinkers and like-minded conspirators she works with today. Walking down a street lined with magnolia trees, Dunst talks about a possible move to Austin, in Plemons’s home state, about a Diane Arbus retrospective the couple saw recently, and the highs and lows of the past year. “There’s no consistency in this industry, so you have to find what is consistent,” she says. “It’s been a shitty year with the fires and with Trump … But right now, I’m very good. I feel good.” The lights change at the intersection and she’s off with a wave, pausing midway across when a thought tickles her. “Imagine I’m just hit by a car right now,” she calls. We’re spared that plot twist – in fact it’s Dunst’s longevity that Cianfrance finds most remarkable of all: “In the entertainment industry, often people peak in high school or burn out in their twenties. Kirsten continues to grow,” he says. “My favourite artists have that ability – Tom Waits keeps evolving. It’s the rarest quality. And Kirsten is out there doing it.” 

Hair: Tsuki at Streeters using ORIBE. Make-up: Nina Park at Kalpana. Manicure: Shigeko Taylor at Star Touch Agency. Set design: Romain Goudinoux at Bryant Artists. Digital tech: Pamela Grant. Lighting: Abena Appiah. Photographic assistants: Keith Kleiner and David Gurzhiev. Styling assistants: Precious Greham and Elliot Soriano. Seamstress: Hasmik Kourinian. Make-up assistant: Olga Pirmatova. Set-design assistant: Paulius Barysas. Production: Connect the Dots. Executive producer: Wes Olson. Producer: Jane Oh. Production manager: Nicole Morra. Production assistants: Juanes Montoya, Tchad Cousins and Khari Cousins. Post-production: Aly Studio

This story features in the Autumn/Winter 2025 issue of AnOther Magazine, on sale internationally on 25 September 2025. Pre-order here.

This story is taken from the Autumn/Winter 2025 issue of AnOther Magazine: 

The mercury is creeping past 35C on a cloudless morning in Toluca Lake, a serene enclave built on peach and walnut groves in the San Fernando Valley. This side of LA might not get breezy westerlies off the Pacific but it’s a little less self-conscious of its status, and that suits Kirsten Dunst – “Kiki” to her friends. She walks into her local brunch spot with her hair still wet from the backyard sprinklers her sons have been playing in to fend off the summer heat. “I lived in the Hills for a while after Spider-Man, when I thought that was what you were supposed to do,” she says as we join the queue for iced coffee. “But I like that it’s low-key here. It’s not ‘cool’.” Her neighbourhood rose up in the 1920s, prized for its proximity to the Universal and Warner Bros studios – Dunst points out a tavern opposite that once served cocktails to the Rat Pack, resurrected by Quentin Tarantino for Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood, and the mid-century diner down the block where she drank milkshakes as a teenager beneath walls patchworked by photographs of Golden Age stars.

There have been Tribeca-loft years and stretches in London, but the 43-year-old has always gravitated back to the Valley since she and her mother flew in from New Jersey in 1992 for pilot season. That year Dunst made it past multiple auditions, screen tests and pint-sized rivals to win a role for the ages: the cherub-faced bloodsucker in pink satin shoes who slices Tom Cruise’s throat in Interview with the Vampire. Three decades later, she has made a very public journey from dimpled child walking the red carpet in knee-high socks and jellies via the American sweetheart whose sunny exterior was undercut by choppier waters, to today’s versatile, virtuoso performer with a streak of auteur-driven, break-your-heart performances that hinge on the cartography of her face. “I grew up as I was doing this – I didn’t know what I liked in film as a kid,” she says. “I had to figure out my own taste, learn all my lessons along the way.” Her more than 70 roles to date have encompassed springy cheerleaders and catatonically depressed brides, haunted Southern belles and minimum-wage Florida firecrackers, indulged queens and battle-weary photojournalists, the connective tissue between them a bone-deep lived-in quality and her gift for projecting multiplicities with a look. There’s also the snaggletooth smile, saved from a Hollywood dentist by Sofia Coppola, who told her 27 years ago that her gently skewed incisors shouldn’t be fixed.

“Well, this is very LA, he’s reading a scene,” Dunst murmurs as we find a table, indicating a man in Ray-Bans nearby underscoring a script with a Sharpie. Later, when a rangy group of guys slump into chairs behind us talking at full volume, her radar is up again – “Look at bro zone over here! It’s like we’re all hanging out in their living room.” Dunst is an inveterate, magpie-eyed observer, a quality that must have served her well during her most recent shoot, with Ruben Östlund. The Swedish provocateur’s latest discomfiting thought experiment, The Entertainment System Is Down, imagines what hell might be unleashed on a long-haul if the in-flight entertainment failed, dooming passengers to 22 hours of each other’s company. With an airplane’s hierarchy governing everything from leg space to mini pretzels, it’s rich territory for a director ruthless at stripping away our surface civility to expose all the pettiness and cruelty crawling underneath. It’s no spoiler to say the plane will go down; Östlund has promised it will and also threatened a scene in which absolutely nothing happens for 15 minutes.

“He’s such an anthropologist of human behaviour, of the nuances of interaction,” Dunst says, splitting a saucer-sized cookie and offering me half. “It’s funny you mention Interview with the Vampire because I haven’t been this excited to get a role since then. And I had to audition for it – everyone did.” (Her co-stars include Keanu Reeves, Samantha Morton and Daniel Brühl.) In hers, Dunst improvised her character, Victoria, unlocking her fiancée’s phone and discovering he’s been serially unfaithful. “Then we Zoomed and I thought Ruben wanted to improvise with me. I was terrified, speed-talking and sweating, but he just said, ‘So I want to make sure you’re comfortable with nudity and my process of 20-plus takes.’ I was like, ‘Ruben, I’ll do whatever to be in your movie.’”

On set inside a retired and reassembled Boeing 747 in Budapest, with 150 extras filling the seats, Dunst experienced the director’s notorious process of ferreting out our underlying impulses in take after take. “He hits this gong on the last take – he definitely has a method. I don’t need that method to give a good performance, but it gave us the opportunity to try so many things,” she says. “We’re in a tiny space, with this camera programmed by remote, so the timing had to be like a ballet dance. We’d do a scene and then Ruben would add champagne popping in the background, or a crying baby, or throw in a dog, or a bag of trash … Everything was set up as this perfect disaster of how people look on a plane – we’re greasy, red, gross, coffee spilled over us … He wanted it as real as possible.”

“I grew up as I was doing this … I had to figure out my own taste, learn all my lessons along the way” – Kirsten Dunst

Dunst’s lack of vanity in front of the lens chimes with some of her favourite performances – Ellen Burstyn in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, say, or Gena Rowlands in Opening Night. She is similarly unprecious about her screentime, choosing quality directors over quantity of lines. She only needed to hear the name Derek Cianfrance, known for his searing portrait of a marriage’s implosion, Blue Valentine, and gritty father-son fable The Place Beyond the Pines, to sign on for his latest. “If Derek sent me the menu for this restaurant, I’d do it,” she says. “He gets the most natural performances and a lot of times it’s the first take. He likes when things feel alive and there’s mistakes, and the way he edits, it feels like all the real stuff – the life stuff.” Roofman is based on the true story of wayward military-trained thief Jeffrey Manchester (played by Channing Tatum), who was imprisoned after a spree of McDonald’s heists and later escaped to hide out for months in a North Carolina Toys R Us. The director cast Dunst as a single-mother employee at the store who’s swept into the felon’s orbit. “I grew up being in awe of Kirsten,” Cianfrance says over the phone from New York. “She takes over the screen – you can’t stop looking at her. I cast the real police officers involved, so here are these cops doing a scene with this Hollywood actor and Kirsten is so salt of the earth, with this incredible ability to connect. Watching them be floored by the truth she gave is something I’ll never forget.”

To attune herself to the precise weather of her characters’ moods, Dunst creates playlists; for Roofman, they spanned a mix of Lee Hazlewood, Nina Simone, Dolly Parton – and Ed Sheeran. “My character is a strong Southern woman but she falls for this guy pretty quickly. So I had to find my inner cheesy romantic. Because I’m not a girl who looks at someone’s bod and goes, ‘Ooh, he’s in shape. He’s hot.’ That doesn’t really do it for me. So, one thing I did was always do a take like I was making a Christmas movie. If we did a Christmas take of our interview, we’d add this little sparkle, right? I have a very dark sense of humour, so I needed a less-jaded part of myself. I’m pretty open but the real me would be, ‘Seriously, what are you doing with this weird dude who doesn’t call you?’”

On set in the fake Toys R Us one day, Dunst noticed something familiar among the giant teddy bears, figurines and chewy sweets lining the shelves: a 16 inch model of herself in the role that made her blockbuster-famous. “There were MJ dolls – me falling off the balcony in Spider-Man,” she says with a laugh. “Actually, I brought those back for my kids.” At four, her younger son is already a year older than Dunst was when she signed to Ford Models and began travelling into New York with her hair in curlers to shoot Macy’s catalogues.

She was born in Point Pleasant on the New Jersey shore to an American mother with Swedish and German roots and a German father. Inez was a flight attendant, Klaus was a medical services executive, and some recipe of her mother’s gregariousness and her father’s work ethic found its way into their first child, who seems to have been born with her foot on the pedal. She booked the first commercial she auditioned for, aged three, and almost 100 followed: Kix cereal, Crayola, Pillsbury, a doll with nylon hair that grew with a pump of its arm, a soft toy kitten that purred. She was an incorrigible performer – a kid who loved The Wizard of Oz but also did a decent impression of Axl Rose, and regularly corralled cousins into staging makeshift plays at family dinners. “I see it in my younger son – he’s a natural comedian,” Dunst says. “My mom’s pushing me in the cart at the grocery store in New Jersey and people were like, ‘Your daughter’s funny, she’s cute, you should take her to an audition.’ That’s how it started – my parents figured they’d put money away for college. I was booking things easily and having fun.”

She graduated to film roles at seven – as Mia Farrow’s daughter in Woody Allen’s segment of the 1989 anthology New York Stories, and then as Tom Hanks’s daughter in Brian De Palma’s Wall Street takedown, The Bonfire of the Vanities. But it was Claudia and her unquenchable bloodlust in Interview with the Vampire that upended her life. On location in New Orleans with Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt, Dunst would be woken at 3pm to do her schoolwork before fitting her acrylic fangs for the nocturnal shoots. Entire lessons with her acting coach were devoted to slamming doors to channel the unbridled fury of an ages-old vampire maddeningly trapped in the body of a ringletted girl, condemned to frilly dresses for eternity. Dunst was fiery-eyed and fearless on camera, her preternatural ability to shift between innocence and scheming maturity no small feat for a child still so young her mother covered her eyes during much of the premiere. When critics compared Dunst to Tatum O’Neal in Paper Moon and Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver, and she was nominated for a Golden Globe, it was clear she’d be leaving New Jersey behind. The family, including younger brother Christian, checked into Oakwood apartments, a well-trodden complex for out-of-town child actors a few minutes’ drive from where we are now. Her straight-talking agent, Iris Burton, a former chorus girl with a barracuda reputation and River Phoenix and Drew Barrymore on her books, liked to warn stage parents to squirrel money away for the moment their offspring morphed into camera-unfriendly teens. No such fate awaited Dunst. As if to underline her elevation to Hollywood royalty, she began receiving what is known in her household as “the Cruise cake”: a white chocolate coconut gateau that has arrived every Christmas for three decades from her Vampire co-star.

In the early years, Dunst’s mother supervised her carousel of auditions and crisscrossed the country for her daughter’s film roles. (Dunst’s parents separated soon after her move to the West Coast.) Through the Nineties that included swatting gigantic mosquitoes with a tennis racket in Jumanji; playing precocious Amy March in Little Women opposite Susan Sarandon and Winona Ryder; and sharing the screen with Dustin Hoffman and Robert De Niro in the needle-sharp political satire Wag the Dog. These days, Inez lives in Dunst’s guesthouse and they’ve maintained a close relationship. Still, the everyday preoccupations of adolescence and the sleepless demands of Hollywood weren’t always aligned. “There were times during my teenage years where I would not want to be working and I was,” Dunst remembers. “I think every child actor goes through some complicated relationship with what they’re doing.” She was enrolled at a private Catholic school, switching between studying with a tutor and returning to class once she’d wrapped a film. “That also gave me anxiety, because I’d forgotten my locker code or which lunch table I sat at. I don’t want my kids to have that sense of unbelonging, of not knowing what the jokes are. I made myself small at school because I didn’t want to be called out as ‘that actress’, or as bitchy, you know? I didn’t want to be a target in high school.”

Those knotty emotions, magnified by the visibility of her burgeoning career, made Dunst a cosmic match for a director who has captured girlhood in flux like no one else. In 1998, Sofia Coppola met up with Dunst in Toronto, where she was filming, and presented her with her script of Jeffrey Eugenides’ novel The Virgin Suicides, the tale of a dreamy clan of sisters cloistered in Seventies suburbia, entrancing and unfathomable to the boys next door. The pair hit it off (“We’re both just very porous people,” Dunst says) and they shot it that summer on a shoestring, with Dunst as free-spirited Lux Lisbon. In her tube tops and Dr Scholl’s, the name of her crush felt-tipped on her underwear, Lux became a lightning rod for every girl accelerating towards womanhood with the gnawing premonition that prize might be a cruel trick. Today, the cult film continues to cast its spell on new generations, referenced on the runway and in academic theses, in pop lyrics and memes and “Which Lisbon Sister Are You?” quizzes.

The experience was transformative for Dunst too: “I was seen through Sofia’s eyes as a 16-year-old who was becoming a woman,” she says. “Nobody else wanted to see me that way. I got to play a role that was more about my sexuality in a beautiful way that wasn’t creepy, you know? With Sofia I could express things that were happening internally that I didn’t feel like I could express in my life.” Lux became defining for her: whether it’s suburban Detroit, the Montana badlands or the court of Versailles, the ticking time-bomb tension between a character’s desires and the world she’s trapped in will forever be associated with Dunst. It lit the fuse on a creative partnership that continues today – she and Coppola have a fourth project simmering: “My most trusted collaborator and little sister,” the director said of Dunst at the 2019 ceremony that etched her an overdue star on the Walk of Fame.

“With Sofia [Coppola] I could express things that were happening internally that I didn’t feel like I could express in my life” – Kirsten Dunst 

As she rode a wave of smart teen movies – the cheerleading caper Bring It On, cut-throat comedy Drop Dead Gorgeous, and later, Spider-Man, playing Peter Parker’s girl next door – Dunst had her north star. “The way Sofia respected me meant that going into the future from The Virgin Suicides, if a director said certain things to me, I’d think, ‘Hm, that’s lame.’ Because I had this internal touchstone in Sofia, who I thought – still think – is one of the coolest people in the world.” Tobey Maguire had driven past Dunst building-high in a Gap ad on Sunset and been prompted to suggest her as his web slinger’s love interest; the resulting trilogy they went on to make with Sam Raimi grossed $2.5 billion at the box office, launched the modern era of the superhero film, created the upsidedown kiss of the century and immortalised Dunst in those plastic figures her children now play with. With her jewel of a performance in Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Dunst was the queen of both multiplex and arthouse by her mid-twenties – the A-lister whose go-to Halloween costume was Charlotte Rampling in the cult Seventies thriller The Night Porter.

At Cannes in 1999 – and despite Faye Dunaway’s mobile phone going off in the middle of the premiere – The Virgin Suicides was lauded by European critics. Dunst and Coppola’s second collaboration, the impressionistic candy-coloured confection Marie Antoinette, wasn’t – at first. In her screenplay, Coppola described her vision as “a gold-plated Versailles hangover of a memory of a lost girl” and Dunst instinctively caught the mood, playing it as a history of feelings rather than facts. Her ill-fated queen is a genuine teenager: rebellious, a little giddy and tragically naive amid the Versailles piranha pool, self-medicating with clothes, shoes and macarons after being married off at 14. A certain breed of Cannes critic balked at the irreverent historical licence and misread Coppola’s focus on superficialities as surface itself. Back then, Dunst described that reaction as “kind of like everyone was stomping on my heart”. Today, we’re in the throes of a full-circle rehabilitation. “All these new historical dramas that have more of a modern twist – that’s pretty much because of Sofia, I think,” she says. “She had such a voice early on that people were threatened by.” Until next spring, the V&A are displaying Dunst’s costumes – including the shoes Manolo Blahnik made by hand in Lyon silks – as part of an exhibition on the bad girl of France. “You know I still have Jason Schwartzman’s sleep shirt from Marie Antoinette?” she says, laughing. “Probably because they wouldn’t give me anything else.”

By 25, the actor had been catapulted to the heights of her profession. But sometime around the close of the Spider-Man trilogy, she found herself depleted. It’s been oft recorded that she checked into a centre in Utah to deal with a period of depression – perhaps a debt called in for almost two and a half decades on camera. “It’s a hard industry,” she says now. “It sets actors up for a really unhealthy relationship with self-confidence, where you don’t have boundaries. In order to put your guts out there you have to take care of yourself, big time. I’m learning that the older I get – to hold my boundaries and make it for myself, not make it about pleasing anybody else.”

On her return from Utah, she reshuffled the deck and began to shape her instinctual gifts into a formidable instrument. Beside her was a new accomplice, the acting coach she still works with today: “I tried one script on tons of different teachers and Greta Seacat was the one,” she says. “For a lot of acting teachers, I feel like it’s about punishment, weirdly. But acting should be about release. It should be cathartic, get something out of you – nobody should be punished for this.” 

A startling example of Dunst’s sense of reinvigoration was the blistering performance she delivered in Lars von Trier’s end-of-the-world drama Melancholia (2011) – frequently cited as one of the best films of the 21st century and certainly the greatest about depression. Dunst’s electrifying Justine, alternately glassy-eyed and ferocious, was born from Dunst’s own experience. “She has the advantage of having had a depression of her own. All sensible people have,” von Trier said at the time. “I smile and I smile and I smile,” Dunst monotones as the unravelling bride, gripped by a despair so raw that the apocalypse, in the shape of a crimson planet on a collision course with Earth, comes as the lifting of a curse. Over the night of her ill-starred wedding she pees on the golf course, has sex with a stranger in a sand bunker and soaks in a bathtub while her guests wait uneasily on the floor below. But in contrast to the pitch-darkness of that role, the bright yellow chiffon cocktail dress Dunst wore to her Cannes photocalls had the suggestion of a light bulb switched back on. It was a mark of how undeniable her performance was that, despite von Trier’s disastrous comment on the Nazis during a press conference, she left the Croisette with the best actress award.

From that point on, Dunst has harnessed her subconscious to immerse herself in the eddies and flows of her characters’ inner lives. She’ll do the practical work – learn to play the piano or ride the horse – but it’s in her dreaming life that her characters truly germinate. One example of that is on display in the second series of Fargo, featuring Dunst as the unhinged Peggy Blumquist, a Minnesota hairdresser who launches a trail of slaughter when she hits a crime family’s prodigal son with her Chevrolet Corvair. Dunst says she dreamed about ScoobyDoo, and so a little of that scamper found its way into Peggy’s walk. Fargo marked her first recurring TV role since she’d played a teen sex worker at 14, opposite George Clooney in ER. As Peggy, Dunst nailed the comic tone without letting us forget the wrench of her disappointment in the too-small life she shares with her homey husband, the tragicomedy of her hopeful blue eyeshadow and beret entirely unsuited to midwinter Minnesota. (Dunst’s grandmother hailed from a farm in the state, so the cheerful lilt of that accent is in her DNA.)

The series brought Dunst Emmy and Golden Globe nominations, and an onscreen husband, Jesse Plemons, who became her offscreen one too. The Friday Night Lights and Breaking Bad actor turned Scorsese, Spielberg and Yorgos Lanthimos favourite met Dunst in the queue at LAX on the way to Canada for Fargo. The shoot entailed five snowbound months in Calgary, and Dunst, wanting Peggy to be “a bit meat and potatoes”, stayed in with Plemons, ate pizza and binge-watched Friday Night Lights. “It was freezing in Calgary and there was nothing to do except hang out with Jesse, my future husband,” she says. “We became such good friends. We had so much dialogue in Fargo – we rehearsed a lot so that we could feel free together, throw it all away and be present.”

Both share the singular experience of growing up a child actor (and making it out the other side). Plemons’s family were extras in the westerns shot near his one traffic-light hometown of Mart, Texas – he got his start twirling a rodeo rope aged three in a Coke commercial. “Jesse is a very present actor – I like people who are just as present as me. That’s what makes it not feel like acting,” Dunst says. “Working with him was like being two dancers – when they’re great together, they fly – you feel like you’re watching something else entirely. With Jesse I feel like I’m reaching another level of what I do.”

“It’s a hard industry. It sets actors up for a really unhealthy relationship with self-confidence, where you don’t have boundaries” – Kirsten Dunst 

They married at GoldenEye in Jamaica and have two sons, Ennis and James – meaning Dunst was a sleep-deprived new mother when she played a sleep-deprived new mother in the series On Becoming a God in Central Florida (2019), a gallows-humour take on the curdling American Dream. Dunst is so effective at hushed performances – see her lonely teacher in Coppola’s candlelit gothic drama The Beguiled, aching for a life beyond the schoolhouse – it’s easy to forget the unruly, anarchic energy she can wield (remember the vicious comedy Bachelorette?). As the loquacious Krystal Stubbs, a waterpark employee fighting the stacked odds of a shady pyramid scheme, she tears down an Orlando drag on a Barbie-pink quad bike with her baby strapped to her chest. “It was exhausting because Krystal doesn’t stop talking. But I wanted to work so badly,” she says of her Golden Globe-nominated performance. “Being a new mom, I could mine a lot of frustrations for that role.”

The series was streaming, with Dunst spray-tanned and dressed in acid-washed double denim, when Jane Campion offered her a role that was Krystal’s polar opposite. The uncompromising filmmaker had wanted to work with Dunst since The Virgin Suicides. “There is something genuinely haunting about her physical beauty and sweetness contradicting a certain darkness that Kirsten can access,” she writes over email. “As an audience you feel constantly torn about wanting the pretty sweet world but recognising it is a mirage.” The beleaguered widow that Dunst went on to play in Campion’s epic psychodrama The Power of the Dog harnesses that dark and light. Her character, Rose, who marries Plemons’s solid rancher only to have her psyche shattered by his vindictive brother (Benedict Cumberbatch), is a broken doll: falteringly applied lipstick, pale ill-fitting dresses, sentences rambly from the gin bottles hidden under her pillow. (Years before, on Drop Dead Gorgeous, Allison Janney had shown Dunst a way of spinning around in circles before the camera rolls to get that unsteady, drunken gait.) On location under roomy skies in New Zealand, she deliberately didn’t talk before a scene to get a lump in her throat – and she and Cumberbatch didn’t speak at all off set. The collaboration with Campion was Dunst’s “lightning in a bottle” moment, the culmination of a lifetime’s screen experience. “Kirsten is a truth machine, says it all, and she’s so funny, quick and kind,” Campion continues. “After she saw the film, she sent me a message saying I was going to get ‘a lot of shrimps for this’. I was pretty confused, but she assured me shrimps were good.” There was indeed a gumbo of shrimps, including an Oscar for Campion, and Academy nominations for Dunst and Plemons – firsts for both. The snap of husband and wife cutting loose in the Oscars’ smoking area that night with the French nominees for Anatomy of a Fall said it all.

During The Power of the Dog, Dunst imagined her onscreen son had killed his father, to stitch their mother-son dynamic with a tighter thread. She likes an unspoken backstory; in last year’s Civil War, as a photojournalist hardened by unconscionable horrors, she suggested to Cailee Spaeny, who plays her protégée, that they were actually mother and daughter, to complicate the interplay of friction and protectiveness. That film, set in a dystopian America of torched strip malls and factional, impetuous violence, was a reminder that few actors can convey emotional baggage behind their eyes like Dunst. “I was kind of playing the director, Alex Garland, who grew up in that world. But I did dreamwork for that to get a bit of a blasé, masculine feeling in my body,” she says, jumping up and doing a slouchy, weighted walk. “I am never going to say who I thought of in my dream – it’s so funny I can’t believe it, but it worked.” If she puts up no walls between herself and her characters though, when the time comes to eject them, her method is surprisingly simple. “I write myself a letter,” she says, bringing up the one she wrote after Östlund’s shoot. “It goes, ‘Dear Inner Self, please sign me out of Victoria and into my true essence so I may be happy, joyous and free. With love and respect, Kirsten.’”

Counting Plemons’s blood-chilling Civil War cameo in red-tinted shades, the couple have now worked together three times. “And no duds yet! Javier Bardem and Penélope Cruz, they do it,” she says. “Next I want us to play a really obnoxious couple, where you’re like, these people are total assholes. We’ll get in really good shape and I’ll get something that wouldn’t suit me at all, like long hair extensions and blown-up lips, if you can reverse that.” (There’s nothing wrong with those things, she says, just that they’d “look really weird on me”.) For now, she and Plemons are alternating film and parenting duties: he is up next, heading to Berlin to play Plutarch Heavensbee, the late Philip Seymour Hoffman’s role, in The Hunger Games prequel. “And I’m with the kids,” she says. “I’m a breakfast mom – pancakes and bacon for dinner.”

The family’s 1930s ranch house, shared with assorted cats and dogs, is lovingly filled with art and keepsakes: a painting of Marie Antoinette in glazed pink by Elizabeth Peyton; a small wooden bird given to Dunst by Campion; a model ship built by her grandfather, a speed-skating champ; the antique mirror Dunst danced in front of as a child; a door that used to live in Jackie O’s New York apartment; and numerous musical instruments belonging to Plemons, whose name has just popped up on her phone, calling to offer her a lift home. Dunst decides she has time to walk, since the kids are at soccer practice. “I enjoyed talking to you,” she says. “I always worry, what is this going to be like? I’ve never gotten used to interviews – talking about yourself isn’t fun and I’m just not a big talker. I’m pretty quiet really.”

In recent years, though, Dunst has been beloved for her frankness – not only for calling out the gender pay gap, the crew member who called her “girly-girl”, or the “sad mom” roles she’s offered, but for the way her responses don’t feel second-guessed. In 40 hard-won years in the business she has never let it mould her, carving her own path towards the original thinkers and like-minded conspirators she works with today. Walking down a street lined with magnolia trees, Dunst talks about a possible move to Austin, in Plemons’s home state, about a Diane Arbus retrospective the couple saw recently, and the highs and lows of the past year. “There’s no consistency in this industry, so you have to find what is consistent,” she says. “It’s been a shitty year with the fires and with Trump … But right now, I’m very good. I feel good.” The lights change at the intersection and she’s off with a wave, pausing midway across when a thought tickles her. “Imagine I’m just hit by a car right now,” she calls. We’re spared that plot twist – in fact it’s Dunst’s longevity that Cianfrance finds most remarkable of all: “In the entertainment industry, often people peak in high school or burn out in their twenties. Kirsten continues to grow,” he says. “My favourite artists have that ability – Tom Waits keeps evolving. It’s the rarest quality. And Kirsten is out there doing it.” 

Hair: Tsuki at Streeters using ORIBE. Make-up: Nina Park at Kalpana. Manicure: Shigeko Taylor at Star Touch Agency. Set design: Romain Goudinoux at Bryant Artists. Digital tech: Pamela Grant. Lighting: Abena Appiah. Photographic assistants: Keith Kleiner and David Gurzhiev. Styling assistants: Precious Greham and Elliot Soriano. Seamstress: Hasmik Kourinian. Make-up assistant: Olga Pirmatova. Set-design assistant: Paulius Barysas. Production: Connect the Dots. Executive producer: Wes Olson. Producer: Jane Oh. Production manager: Nicole Morra. Production assistants: Juanes Montoya, Tchad Cousins and Khari Cousins. Post-production: Aly Studio

This story features in the Autumn/Winter 2025 issue of AnOther Magazine, on sale internationally on 25 September 2025. Pre-order here.