Kirsten Dunst claims Hollywood director asked her “inappropriate question” as a teenager
Kirsten Dunst recently shared an experience when she was asked something “inappropriate” by a male director when she was 16 and alone in his office. Recalling the event, she said that the question had nothing to do with acting or the part she was interested in, which led her to feel unsettled about the encounter.
During a new interview, the actor mentioned her experiences working on Interview with the Vampire at the age of 11, saying that “everyone was very gentle and kind, and nothing ever felt weird.” However, she came face-to-face with the dark side of the industry when she was 16 and auditioning for a highly competitive role.
Dunst stated that the director “had me in his office, by myself, and was asking me about this movie he wanted me for, and then, completely out of the blue, asked me this inappropriate question.” The actor declined to explain further, but said that the question was enough for her mother to withdraw her from the audition process immediately.
Although she didn’t name the director, she claimed that it’s not something that she enjoys rehashing as the question seemed “a bit off.” She added that she remembers “sitting there and knowing that something was wrong, but with no idea what I should do.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Dunst recalls finding a fierce ally in Sofia Coppola while acting in The Virgin Suicides. The director, Dunst says, “gave me so much confidence in my teenage years” in front of the camera and as a young person in Hollywood. She recognised the value of finding mentorship in a director like Coppola, claiming it to be a unique dynamic in today’s landscape.
Regarding gender pay disparities, the actor admitted that this wasn’t something she had always thought about, not because she felt indifferent but because it didn’t feel like something that anyone concerned themselves with.
“I had no awareness of that, nor even that the fact I was being paid much, much less than Tobey [Maguire] might be unfair,” she tells The Telegraph, recalling her experience on Spider-Man. “So it wasn’t as if I was turning up to the set every day feeling bad about it. It was just something no-one even thought to question.”
Dunst is set to star in Ex Machina director Alex Garland’s upcoming movie Civil War, as a journalist in the near-future during a time when various states in America break away from the union, causing widespread unrest and civil conflict. “It’s a warning, and I hope it gets people talking,” Dunst says, and it’s highly likely that it will – Civil War is a contemporary war movie that looks to test the intersection between government systems and human destruction and violence.
Watch the trailer below.
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