The line Kirsten Dunst will never cross again for a movie: “I put my foot down”
Not every child star makes it as an adult, but Kirsten Dunst has been able to defy those expectations and forge an incredible career for herself.
Audiences first became aware of her as the young Claudia in Interview with the Vampire, before moving on to appear in classic noughties teen fare like Bring It On and The Virgin Suicides. In later years, she has fronted a variety of projects, including Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog and Alex Garland’s Civil War. An impressive array of credits for a star who could have burned themselves out at a young age.
To cinemagoers of a certain age, Dunst will always be Mary Jane Watson in Sam Raimi’s trilogy of ‘Spider-Man’ movies. First taking on the role in 2002, Dunst served as the perfect on-again-off-again love interest for Tobey Maguire’s webslinger. In many ways, she is still the measuring stick for superhero partners to this day, and her appeal in those films helped kickstart the comic book movie revolution that we are still very much living through.
Being the girlfriend of a mask-wearing crimefighter comes with a unique set of perils. Across the three movies, Mary Jane becomes the target of all sorts of nasty individuals, from the maniacal Green Goblin to the robotically-enhanced Doctor Octopus to a sentient lump of black space goo. That’s scarier than it sounds, I swear. As a result, Dunst was forced to do a lot of stunts, some of which went well, some of which didn’t.
While breaking down some of her most iconic parts to GQ, the star had one uncomfortable experience that she was in no rush to repeat. “I remember one stunt that they tested on me once, and they, like, pulled me up basically to the top of a Sony soundstage, which is enormous,” she recalled. “They let me free fall until the very last second, and I was like, ‘Should have done that on camera. I will never do that again’. It was like a bungee jump, and I’m not that, like, I don’t need that adrenaline personally. So that was, I put my foot down. I was like, ‘I’m never doing that ever again.’”
These comments came during a discussion about the first ‘Spider-Man’ film. In that movie, Mary Jane gets caught up in several attacks by Willem Dafoe’s Green Goblin. She’s likely referring to the moment when the Goblin drops her off a bridge, and at the same time, he releases a wire holding up a cable car full of children, forcing the hero to make an impossible choice.
This wasn’t the first time Dunst had been put in a physically demanding and scary situation for a movie. For Bring It On, which is set in the world of cheerleading, director Peyton Reed wanted to avoid using stunt doubles. As a result, Dunst and her co-stars had to attend a four-week boot camp to learn how to cheer for real. Being tossed up in the air is one thing, but free-falling several dozen feet off a massive soundstage? Pull the other one.
Luckily, this incident didn’t put Dunst off superhero movies for good. Without the Raimi ‘Spider-Man’ series, it might have looked very different and, probably, wouldn’t have been anywhere near as good.
