http://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/2004/09/12/arts/roch.184.1.jpgKirsten Dunst Pretends to Be a Jock
By MARGY ROCHLIN
Published: September 12, 2004
EST HOLLYWOOD
KIRSTEN DUNST tells a story about the strangeness of fame. She was 12 and had landed what would be her breakthrough role as an aging woman in a child's body opposite Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt in "Interview With the Vampire." At the time, she lived with her family in a complex of furnished apartments near the Warner Brothers lot that is famous as a way station for stage parents and their child-star offspring and as a hotbed of scuttlebutt and competition. One day, Ms. Dunst recalled, a young girl approached her and bragged, "My agent says I'm going to be the next Kirsten Dunst."
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Ms. Dunst frowns at the memory. "She had no idea who I was," she says, adding that all she could do was shrug and agree with this vessel of ricocheting gossip. "I knew it was so weird. Even at that age, I had perspective."
These days, Ms. Dunst would be unlikely to meet someone who knew her name but not her proletarian-pretty face. For the past decade, she has slowly been building on the obvious promise of her "Interview With the Vampire" splash by selecting roles that emphasize versatility over insta-stardom. She has tried harder than most other actors of her generation to avoid routine ingénue parts, allowing her regular-gal imperfections — a doughy brow, crooked teeth and a distinctively reedy voice — to amplify the dramatic context of her roles. Her turn as a doomed suburban sister in Sofia Coppola's art film "The Virgin Suicides" was as finely wrought as the all-American squealer she played in the mainstream cheerleader comedy "Bring It On." And unlike most young Hollywood actresses, Ms. Dunst is willing to show herself in less-than-flattering lights: her performance as an emotionally lost rich girl in "Crazy/Beautiful" was uncompromisingly glitzless, and in last year's otherwise sickeningly sweet "Mona Lisa Smile," Ms. Dunst embodied self-righteous, snobbery-ridden evil. Though Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet had top billing in this year's "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," a case could be made that Ms. Dunst's brief scenes in an ancillary plot contained the film's most curiously touching moments. And what finally put her onto the A-list was her role as one of the comic book genre's more famous superhero love interests, Peter Parker's Mary Jane, in the two "Spider-Man" films, which together grossed more than $760 million domestically. But when Ms. Dunst first met with the British director Richard Loncraine about a part in his coming film "Wimbledon," the first "Spider-Man" had not yet been released.
"Wimbledon," opening Friday, tells the story of Peter Colt (Paul Bettany), a veteran tennis player in what he figures will be an uneventful last hurrah at England's famed championship. Through a recreational fling with Ms. Dunst's Lizzie, an upstart athlete as swaggeringly confident of her ability to seduce men as she is of her serve and volley, Peter learns that a bit of distraction improves his game. Earlier this year, when Mr. Loncraine showed "Wimbledon" to test audiences, he experienced firsthand the moviegoer pull Ms. Dunst had developed since their first meeting three years ago.
"Wimbledon" is "really about Paul's journey, but people wanted to know more about her," he said by telephone from London.
He wound up expanding Ms. Dunst's role, making her more of a romantic comedy co-lead. And judging from the "Wimbledon" marketing campaign, who is the bigger star is more important than which character is actually driving the story. In the prerelease poster, a laughing, racket-bearing Ms. Dunst stands in the foreground, while the relative Hollywood newcomer Mr. Bettany, best known as the earnest doctor in "Master and Commander," lurks slightly behind.
On this hot August afternoon, while sitting under an arched walkway at the Chateau Marmont hotel in West Hollywood, Ms. Dunst, 22, chose to deflect questions about how her role was fortified in favor of detailing how a Hollywood actress — a rather slender, delicate one at that — fakes being a tennis whiz for the cameras.
"What was I supposed to do?" she asked. "I'm not a pro. Really, it was about how I moved across court, the grunting and the intensity. So I sold a lot of it like this," she said, framing herself from the top of her head to her waist and twisting her face into an exaggerated grimace. The expression looks comic now, but what Ms. Dunst's scene partners have learned is that she can take charge of a movie with such bristling energy alone. What gave an extra kick to her "Bring It On" performance, for example, is how she always seemed out of synch even when she was supposedly busting the same pep-squad moves as everyone else. She pulled off the same trick in Peter Bodganovich's old-Hollywood docudrama "The Cat's Meow," stealing a dance sequence from a pack of older, accomplished co-stars by throwing herself into a Charleston with pure, flying-elbows vigor.
Today, though, most of her energy seemed concentrated in her hands: for the last hour, she had been nervously hoisting up the front of her low-cut black slip dress, fiddling with the sleeves of her cashmere sweater and playing with the thin chain hanging from her long, elegant neck. She was furiously twirling a lock of her corn-silk tresses around her forefinger when an expression of alarm settled over her pale face.
"Oh, God, they keep falling out," she said. She held up a 10-inch-long hank of blond hair. It was one of dozens of extensions laboriously pinch-braided into her own hair for a role Ms. Dunst is currently playing in Cameron Crowe's "Elizabethtown." Ms. Dunst handed the swatch over to a reporter. "I want you to have it," she said, playfully. Then, a split second later, she seemed to regret her gift. "You'll probably smell cigarettes and think, 'Wow, she's been smoking.' "
Given Ms. Dunst's recent popularity with the tabloid press, perhaps she can be forgiven for worrying that someone might want to extract details of her private life from several strands of hair. Earlier in the week, it had been reported that she and her boyfriend, Jake Gyllenhaal, had ended their relationship of two years. The news might not have generated the brouhaha of, say, the front-page split of Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez, but it had been dissected with similar sobriety.
"We're not even broken up," she said, recounting a recent lunch with Mr. Gyllenhaal that drew concerned glances from the surrounding diners. "It was so funny watching everybody, like, care so much about us."
Ms. Dunst may want people to see her movies, but she also wishes they'd get bored with publications like Us Weekly. "First they hype us like we're the cutest couple on earth, just so they can bring us down. Why can't they just write, `They're young and it's still evolving'?" (A month or so after the interview, representatives of both Ms. Dunst and Mr. Gyllenhaal would suggest that it had indeed evolved along the lines already reported.) Ms. Dunst could only force out a tight laugh. "Ha, ha, ha. Can't let it bother you, I guess."
"I'm just tired," she said, with an apologetic wave of her hand.
The night before, on a 10-day break from "Elizabethtown," she had gone out for wine and pizza with her girlfriends, then ended up at a Los Angeles nightclub, dancing until the wee hours. Ms. Dunst, who became her family's chief wage earner at age 3 by working as a Ford model and appearing in television commercials, remembers being a child who disliked downtime.
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"I didn't want to deal with life stuff — I just wanted to work and work and work," said Ms. Dunst, who after a day of public school in Bricktown, N.J., would be driven to auditions in Manhattan by her mother, Inez. When Ms. Dunst was 9, everyone except her father, Klaus Dunst, decamped for Hollywood. (Ms. Dunst's parents divorced when she was 13.) What her Los Angeles-based acting coach John Homa always noticed was how much his blue-eyed pupil with the wind-chime voice hated to skip a session.
"Honest to God, if Inez had logistical problems, Kirsten would pick up the phone herself and say, `Johnny, can you pick me up?' " recalled Mr. Homa, who spent eight months with Ms. Dunst prepping her for her "Interview With the Vampire" tryout. Entire sessions would be spent, for example, having little Kirsten repeatedly slam a door until she could summon up the blazing rage of someone decades older. How did she cope with nearly a year of pressure?
"Here's the thing about Kirsten," Mr. Homa said. "When the lights come on, so does she. Always did. Always will."
When the key lights are off, though, said the French director Michel Gondry ("Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind"), Ms. Dunst knows how to let her hair down. "With some actresses, you have to keep what we call in French `a wooden tongue' — you don't say anything offending," Mr. Gondry said in slightly fractured English. "But I had a really good time talking bad about people with Kirsten. She doesn't mind saying, 'I don't like this girl, she's this and she's that.' It makes you feel a closeness with her. It's charming."
Ms. Dunst has shown a flair for roles that allowed her to communicate that beneath her bright smile roiled some less cheerful feelings — anger, petulance, exasperation. Still, Ms. Dunst said she didn't know what to think when Mike Newell, the director of "Mona Lisa Smile," let it be known that he had a part for her that would let her dark emotions run loose. She had assumed he would want her for the role of Joan, the thoughtful 50's Wellesley student ultimately played by Julia Stiles. In the end, though, she was glad she was cast as the ferocious, uppity Betty, she said, "because I have that in me, too. She was a bitch because she was so unhappy."
Much of what is appealing about Ms. Dunst is that despite everything — she's been in show business, after all, for 19 years now — she's not that different from other young women of her age. For example, when she discovered two messages on her cellphone — one from a friend named Judy, another from her mother — she immediately returned her friend's call, then quietly slipped the phone back in her brown handbag.
Back in the old days, Mom might have been ringing in with news regarding Ms. Dunst's latest assignment, the title role in Sofia Coppola's forthcoming period drama, "Marie Antoinette." The movie deals with the title character as a teenager suddenly thrust into power — a subject Ms. Dunst should be able to relate to. When she turned 19, she became the sole Dunst in charge of project picking. She acknowledged that her newfound sovereignty — a few years old now but still fresh to her — has been hard on her mother.
"It's a big change for her, because she was so involved in everything," Ms. Dunst said. "Now she's upset with me because I don't call enough. I always tell her: `I never went to college, Mom! I never had those four years away from home. I'm doing that now.' "
Margy Rochlin, who is based in Los Angeles, writes frequently about movies and television.
― amateur!!!st (amateurist), Sunday, 12 September 2004 22:43 (twenty-one years ago)