Kirsten Dunst keeps things real

Kirsten Dunst keeps things real
By Wesley Morris
| Globe Staff

One afternoon last September, Kirsten Dunst sat in a chair in a Toronto hotel. Her hair was up. Her legs were crossed in a pair of skinny jeans. She held a water bottle, wore a silken blue blouse that buttoned in every direction so as to give nothing away, and shiny yellow flats. She was put together, as they say. But not too put together. Take her fingers. The unpainted nails didn’t extend far beyond the tips, several of which bore the traces of something like soil or ink. Smudges. It wasn’t that she was unfinished (she seemed complete). It was that Dunst was comfortable being as she was: a working actress, and those were the hands of a worker.

“A lot of people isolate themselves from reality,’’ she said in a brief, energetic conversation during a promotion for Lars von Trier’s “Melancholia,’’ which opens Friday. By “people’’ she meant certain kinds of actors, the pampered kind. “They have all these assistants, and they have the chefs, and they have the gated homes, and they don’t pick up their dry-cleaning anymore. How can you play real people? No real people have, like, the buffest arms on the planet. I don’t know one girl who has time to work out that much except for an actress.’’

Dunst is an admirer of actresses like Julianne Moore, women with lines and creases and complex humanity. “Women want to see real women,’’ she said. “That’s what I want to see, anyway - maybe not everyone. A lot of people want to see big boobs, big lips, big hair, tan.’’ That is not Kirsten Dunst.

In a climate of increasingly accepted enhancements, Dunst looks exotically natural. Her tiny teeth don’t gleam, her skin doesn’t glow, and the rest of her modest features confer a boyish femininity, which, she said, has a lot to do with her being part European. Her father, Klaus, is a German executive who, along with her mother, raised Dunst mostly in New Jersey. But for reasons of both temperament and genes, she finds herself drawn to European directors. The latest is also the most notorious: von Trier, the Dane whose domestic disaster drama casts Dunst as Justine, a woman who can’t bring herself to enjoy her enormous, expensive-looking wedding because she’s certain the world is going to end.

Dunst is hardly the first famous woman to stand at the center of one of von Trier’s projects. He’s given Emily Watson, Björk, Nicole Kidman, Bryce Dallas Howard, and Charlotte Gainsbourg some of their best roles. The same goes for Dunst. In the spring, she won the actress prize at the Cannes Film Festival. During the festival, Dunst became an internationally sympathetic figure. She sat to von Trier’s left as he proceeded to give a post-screening press conference that took over Cannes. He joked about making adult movies with Dunst and Gainsbourg, who plays Justine’s sister in “Melancholia.’’ Then a joke about sympathizing with Hitler pooled into a stream-of-consciousness musing about Jews, Nazis, and himself. Unsure of what exactly to do, Dunst left the room, began to sign autographs, and dutifully posed for paparazzi.

In Toronto, months later, she acknowledged that as much as some people, including her, don’t want to talk about that press conference, it happened and must be discussed. “I was genuinely surprised, shocked, and worried. And freaking out. And also so embarrassed for my friend, who is drowning next to me.’’ On the one hand, it was von Trier being von Trier. Only the other, as Dunst put it, “You can joke about making a four-hour porno but not Hitler, not the way he did.’’

Could Dunst’s gravitation toward European filmmakers have anything to do with her father? Did von Trier remind her of him? “Not at all. No. Not. At. All.’’ At the start of the “Melancholia’’ shoot, Dunst said, she tread lightly. “I’d heard negative things about Lars,’’ she said, then she spoke to Howard, who made “Manderlay’’ with von Trier, and felt only mildly comforted since “it sounded like she was holding something back.’’ But Dunst said she found the experience to be warm and nurturing. It also came with a tremendous political upside. “Who else is writing these roles for women? Him and Almodóvar. That’s basically it.’’

The first hour of “Melancholia’’ inverts typical wedding-day neurosis from external panic to private collapse. The second half dramatizes Justine’s prophecy. It’s true that her downbeat fixation is also her director’s. But Dunst’s best acting has always been stormy - this simultaneous sadness and anger and risk. One reason she isn’t as starry as she seemed destined to be has to do with her attraction to the dark matter in which constellations hang.

Between 1999 and 2000, a string of comedies - “Dick,’’ “Drop Dead Gorgeous,’’ and “Bring It On’’ - made a case for Dunst as a bright, physical specimen - cheerleader, beauty-pageant contestant, etc. She was resourcefully funny in all three movies. But what was more powerful about Dunst was what we couldn’t see. During that same stretch, she also appeared as sullen muse in Sofia Coppola’s “The Virgin Suicides’’ and as a depressive drunk in the film “Crazy/Beautiful,’’ a love drama that found her as needy and achy and mad as the ardent, forever-young neck-biter she played in “Interview With the Vampire.’’

Once you saw Dunst go there, it was hard to see her go anywhere else. Dunst is 29 and has been working since she was a child. She wanted to get her hands dirty; and with all due respect to cheerleaders, you don’t get your hands dirty shaking pompoms. An ingénue had chosen to be an actress. According to Dunst, one of the keys to her longevity (lasting this long, she said, is her proudest feat) is playing her age to her audience. “When I was a teenager, I made movies for teenagers. Whether it was ‘Jumanji’ or ‘Little Women’ or ‘Virgin Suicides,’ we were all going through these things together, people of my age. Except for ‘Interview With a Vampire,’ I never made adult-adult movies.’’

This all sounds very strategic, but that’s not entirely the case. When Dunst was choosing parts, she said she wanted to have fun and she wanted to be able to relate to the parts. The comedies, she said, “were movies I’d want to watch at that age.’’ But Dunst said she migrates to people who’ll get her. Ultimately, “you’re the friends you have. It’s the same with directors. They migrate to certain types of actors or actresses. I think Sofia and I - that movie - changed the way people perceived me.’’

Another reason Dunst has enjoyed a career that’s thrived under the radar is that she’s a scrupulous chooser. “I never want to do a movie for the wrong reason. Sometimes you can get pressured by people, like, ‘You should do this for this because it will do this for your career.’ But if you’re not connected to the story, it’s hard to be good in a movie - unless you’re working with great actors, then you just make it about that. ’’ When asked for an example of such a movie, she thinks, then offers a correction. “I made that point, but I actually haven’t done that. I’m usually like, ‘The cast is great, but the script! Has no one else read the script?’ ’’

Somewhere between movies that you do because you can relate and movies that you do because they can help your career are the three “Spider-Man’’ movies she made for Sam Raimi. She said she loved them. She exclaimed it, really. With charming disregard for the billions they’ve grossed, she thinks of them as independently spirited films. Their success neither launched her to some new commercial place nor trapped her in a blockbuster zone.

It’s tempting to praise Dunst for exploring women with demons - even the Mary Jane of those “Spider-Man’’ films carries a wounded glint. But a word like “fearless’’ sounds excessive since taking risks is part of an actor’s job. She disagreed: “That’s a great word. As you get older, you get inhibited, then you figure it out again. I have my ways of thinking about things when I get stuck, doing take after take. Then I remember there always is another take, so why not try something new. I like watching performances where it feels like the actor is really living in what’s happening rather than really planned out things and it sounds the same every time. I don’t understand that kind of acting. I would hate being an actress if that was my experience. I’ve always tried to live with who I’m working with, not to play or act something. Intuitively, sometimes you’re really wrong about what works and what doesn’t work. You could have done something that’s really great but you’re like, ‘Oh, that take sucked.’ Part of being an actor is not knowing.’’