Stupid girlfriend? No, not interested
Kirsten DUNST is languid. In the heat of the spring afternoon, the 22-year-old actress has melted into the couch in the lobby of the Chateau Marmont hotel.
She sometimes comes here with her girlfriends and hangs out by the pool. “It feels like a little vacation,” says Dunst, from the side of her mouth. She’s chewing fiercely on the straw of her iced coffee. Her milk-fed blondness, which she’s mined for both comedy and pathos, seems more irregular and slightly impish now that she’s freed from the dictates of costume and makeup. She’s wearing faded blue shorts and a loose white T-shirt, her black-rooted hair twirled about in an odd hairdo, a transitional growing-out coif that comes with lots of hairpins and a tiny sprite of a ponytail.
Vacation is something Dunst speaks of longingly as she rides the “Spider-Man 2” marketing juggernaut, a whirl of activity that will encompass many countries on many continents, multiple magazine covers, a multiday Mario Testino “Vogue” shoot (“All of his assistants are gorgeous. It’s so intimidating to be around, being photographed and being watched by these gorgeous guys”) and a stint on “Oprah.” “I did it once before, and that lighting is not geared to me. That’s for sure,” she says with a giggle. “I look so funny. Little squinty eyes and this huge lug of hair.”
Dunst doesn’t have the perma-press emotionality of someone who’s been in the Hollywood spin cycle too long, with every feeling processed and reprocessed and trotted out for public consumption. It’s a small miracle, given that she’s been working since the age of 3, appearing in 70-odd commercials before graduating to such films as “Interview With the Vampire,” “Bring It On” and the recently released “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.”
She admits she can get too candid -- an endearing quality that gets her in trouble sometimes. “I have to write ‘I’m sorry’ letters,” she says with mock dolefulness.
Today she mostly uses her eyes for effect -- opening them wide in a wacky, conspiratorial way when she wants to suggest, without actually saying, that a certain movie isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. She maintains an air of truth amid complete deniability.
“Spider-Man 2” isn’t one of the movies that gets the eye treatment -- in part because she’s had a hand in shaping her screen alter ego, Mary Jane Watson.
Dunst anchors “Spider-Man” in a world of murky emotion, playing an object of adoration that somehow transcends that status.
“I’m sick of playing stupid girlfriend roles, and I’m not going to do that anymore,” she says, although she pointedly adds that Mary Jane is not just a girlfriend part.
“Mary Jane is a vital role. The love story is the most important part of ‘Spider-Man,’ and in this movie it even affects his powers and everything he does even more,” she explains. At the end of the first film, Mary Jane declares her love to the boy-man Peter Parker/Spider-Man, who can’t reciprocate. The second one picks up on this dilemma. “Mary Jane has grown up a lot, but Pete has stayed pretty juvenile in his social relationships with Mary Jane. He’s not there for her at all because he has this other thing.” Magic powers and stuff.
This time, Dunst had lots of talks with director Sam Raimi about Mary Jane’s character. “I just wanted her to be very strong in her conversations with Peter. I wanted her to be a thinker and very decisive with him about what’s going on and not pussyfoot around their relationship. I wanted her to be the driving force of what ultimately happens in the story, and I am, and I’m happy about that. She’s the one who takes charge.”
The second film cost more than $200 million and debuts June 30. For a moment it appeared that Tobey Maguire wouldn’t redon his tights because of some combination of back problems and studio hardball, a slightly uncomfortable situation for Dunst because the proposed replacement happened to be Jake Gyllenhaal, her boyfriend of several years. “It was weird,” she admits. “It was not easy at all. Jake and I will work together down the line. I was happy it wasn’t ‘Spider-Man.’ It wouldn’t have been good for the movie.” She mimics what critics would have said: “ ‘They’re really in a relationship, and now they’re doing ‘Spider-Man.’ It’s so much better that Tobey played Spider-Man.”
Dunst says making the second film felt very different -- mostly because she felt different. “All the hoopla around [the movie business] I used to buy into a lot more. I used to be excited about hanging out on the set. I like my life better than hanging out on the set. I love what I do, but I just want to go to work and come home to my life and not have it cross over in any way.” Having a life outside of the business seems to be a big theme for Dunst.
“What I have a problem with is that all the things in my life were for a lot of years geared toward work,” she explains.
She looks back on all those years when her artist mother dragged her to commercial auditions in New York City with more cockeyed wonder than resentment. “I was just playing and having fun. I was making my mom happy. When a kid makes other people happy, you think it’s love. Everything is so great. I liked performing for people.” Her tone begins to change. “Probably it’s not really good that a young kid likes performing for everybody. They just want love and attention somewhere. It’s kind of weird.”
Her mother shielded her from rejections, but that was harder to do as she got into the double digits. “I auditioned for the ‘Secret Garden’ movie. When I didn’t get that I was sobbing on the floor,” she recalls. “When other people want something for you so badly and you’re young you want it so badly too. I was crying because you feel like you’ve let your mom down. It’s really messed up, when you think about it.”
Dunst still loves her mom, although by the time she was 19 she began picking her own parts, guided mostly by intuition and, as she says, “director, director, director.” Up next, she stars in Richard Loncraine’s “Wimbledon,” a kind of “A Star Is Born” set in the tennis world, and will soon be playing a flight attendant in the upcoming Cameron Crowe romantic comedy “Elizabethtown.” To win the latter role, she had to audition for the first time in years. “My nerves were crazy,” she says.
She also lives in her own brand-new house, with Gyllenhaal, their German shepherd and not much furniture -- although she tried unsuccessfully to persuade Chanel to sell her fabric to cover her couch.
As she becomes a superstar, she’s keenly aware that there are more and more people eager to protect her from the vicissitudes of grown-up life. “I grew up in a lot of ways really early, but didn’t at all in a lot of other ways,” she says. “Now it’s worse. You say you have a bloody nose, and 12 people get you a tissue,” she says. She rolls her eyes for effect, then adopts the cadences of a self-deprecating Valley girl, if such an oxymoron were possible. “ ‘I just have a bloody nose, guys.’ ”
Dunst likes her newly won maturity.
“I don’t want to be a big baby,” she says in her own voice. “I want to grow up and be an adult.
“They want to keep you childlike and ignorant in a lot of things.”