'Melancholia' doesn't define happy Kirsten Dunst

'Melancholia' doesn't define happy Kirsten Dunst
By Donna Freydkin, USA TODAY

Here are a few things to know about Kirsten Dunst.

The Garden State native can work a hard-core New Jersey accent when she feels like it. She's hyper-punctual, always. She's generally easygoing and up for anything. In another life, she'd be an interior decorator. She has a fashion-crush on director Sofia Coppola, her friend, and totes around an overstuffed dark blue bag that Coppola designed for Louis Vuitton.

And she's getting the best notices of her lengthy career for playing a depressed bride in Lars von Trier's trippy drama Melancholia, opening Friday.

"The most important thing to me is to be respected in the job you do. That's my goal with my peers and in life. I try to pick projects that I think are interesting," says Dunst, 29. "There's different career paths. You can go the money route. You can go the celebrity route. You can do both. To a lot of people, I'm still the girl from Spider-Man. Which is fine."

On-screen, the lithe Dunst has been a vampire, a cheerleader, a suicidal Detroit teenager and a doomed French queen. Most famously to date, she played arachnid superhero Tobey Maguire's love, Mary Jane Watson, in Sam Raimi's Spider-Man trilogy. She's bewitching, says Coppola, who directed Dunst in 1999's dreamily tragic The Virgin Suicides and 2006's royal fable Marie Antoinette.

"I like that she's deep and smart and has a good sense of humor. I don't feel like I have to explain much. She has that mysterious quality that makes you want to watch her, and I like that she seems deep in contrast to her cute, blond looks," says Coppola. "I think she just has a quality about her that draws you in."

Dunst hopscotches between budgets and genres, and gravitates to whatever moves her at the moment.

"For me, it's what I'm feeling and what I want to be a part of. It's the director, firstly," she says. "I'd rather do a mediocre script with a great director any day. That part changes a lot. It's what resonates with me emotionally. I try not to do a movie just to do a movie."

That's precisely what led her to Melancholia and the famously oddball von Trier. The mercurial and outspoken Danish director made global headlines at, and was ejected from, this year's Cannes Film Festival for saying at a news conference that he sympathized with Hitler "a little bit." Von Trier later said it was a joke gone wrong, but his statements diverted attention away from his film, and from Dunst's subsequent best-actress award, and turned his cast into apologists.

But nothing von Trier could have spouted off detracts from Dunst's experience or the Cannes acting prize. "It's so special. I was so honored and so grateful for it. I've been working for so long," says Dunst.

Besides, she adds, any headlines aside, "the movie speaks for itself. He has apologized. He's embarrassed. It's not what he stands for. It's not him at all. It was kind of taken out of context. You're dealing with Lars von Trier here. He says provocative stuff. He tried to make a joke that he thought he was Jewish. It was totally inappropriate. Now it's become sort of our story, and that's what's disappointing. But if it wasn't a good movie, we wouldn't be talking right now."

In reality, says Dunst, von Trier is gentle and sweet. The two went on long walks. They talked at length about her character, Justine, who goes through with a lavish wedding even though she's at rock bottom emotionally. And the entire cast and crew bonded during shooting. (Von Trier was not available for comment for this article.)

'Magical' experiences

"When you're taken out of your elements and brought to the foreign land of Sweden in the middle of forests, and you're walking with Lars on these hikes and getting to know one another, it feels like a dream," says Dunst. "Nobody left for long periods of time. We stayed at this one hotel, with these houses around it. It was very intimate. I love that feeling on movies, where everyone is kind of transported. It was a very freeing and wonderful experience, very magical and special."

Dunst, who's single, was treated for depression at Cirque Lodge in 2008, a topic she's not eager to discuss three years later. But she understood Justine's emotional state and says depression is a universal topic because everyone has either felt that way or known someone who did. Still, quips Dunst, don't confuse her with Justine, who ditches her wedding reception to go soak alone in a tub: "I'm not the indie depressed girl."

What she is, says Andrew Jarecki, who directed her in the 2010 drama All Good Things, is tireless. "She's German. She has that tough German dad. She has that work ethic," he says. "Here you have a beautiful girl who could have slid by on sexiness and her smile, and she never did. She's always on time. She's been working a long time. She's not the daughter of someone famous. She made a career for herself. She's very mature, but yet that doesn't stop her from acting like a little kid in the best way."

What would surprise people about Dunst? "She is a natural blond and has no ego," says Isla Fisher, who just wrapped an as-yet-untitled raunchy bridal comedy with her and clicked with Dunst, whom she describes as "cool, funny, sexy, fun-loving, insightful, kind, easygoing, chilled, sweet, gregarious."

Adds Coppola: "She's fun to be around and enjoys herself. She's feminine and up for anything. She's up for trying whatever you come up with — she's not challenging. She's bubbly and fun, but not a light person. She struggles with things about herself. She's open, smart, doesn't take herself too seriously. She can be a goofball."

In fact, Dunst is giggly and bubbly in person, with a unique laugh that is almost a hack. Now that she lives in Manhattan, she deeply sympathizes with New York City's cabdrivers for the advent of Taxi TV, which forces them to hear the same stories over and over. Someday she'd love to create a home décor collection.

"I see all these people making so much money off the weirdest things! I just feel like it's a smart way to make money for doing independent films," she says. "I am someone who really cares about the products I put out. Even if it was inexpensive, I'd want it to be really well done. I feel like Target does a really good job with that. I do love nice-smelling things. We'll see what happens."

So she'd really create a capsule collection of some kind? "I feel like that's when you're chilling at home and you've had two kids and you want to take care of them. You start making all these lines and things," says Dunst.

Now that she's older, Dunst says, she's slowing down, after being on film sets for all of her childhood. She's selective and often opts to do small roles in ensemble films, such as the upcoming On the Road.

'Promoting and producing'

"I've been working for so long. When you're constantly producing and promoting and producing and promoting, it does get a little taxing. It's a never-ending thing," she says. "As I get older, I'm fine with not working. That's a good thing that's come with getting older. I will chill for as long as I can. I couldn't go from one to the next."

For someone who has been famous for the majority of her life, Dunst has managed not only to maintain a solid career, but to remain mostly out of the spotlight. Her secret? Being herself.

"I'm a pretty simple person in terms of what makes me happy. I've never had to reach outside and make my fame something to use in a negative way to fill myself in some way. That helps me create a very normal, low-key life," she says. "There's definitely people who walk into a store and want to be recognized by the way they hold themselves. Or you can be the person who's just mellow. Some people crave the attention of being a celebrity more than others."

With the exception of her 1994 role in Interview With the Vampire, which had her kissing Brad Pitt when she was 10 and he was 18 years her senior, Dunst has acted her age on-screen, playing characters who reflect her own maturity.

"I didn't plan it out, but I really pretty much always stuck to what I wanted to do, did teenage movies when I was a teenager, which I think was appropriate. I did Crazy/Beautiful when I was in high school," she says. "You build fans who grow up with you, in a way."