The scene Kirsten Dunst shot once and never again
It’s been 35 years since Kirsten Dunst made her on-screen debut, and she’s made the often-difficult transition from child star to established actor look easier than most, something she’s accomplished by taking on more complex and challenging roles while never chasing the easiest paycheque.
By the time she’d even left her teens, Dunst was a Golden Globe nominee for her supporting performance in Interview with the Vampire, while her filmography also featured Little Women, Jumanji, Disney’s animated Anastasia, Wag the Dog, and The Virgin Suicides, which is quite the collection of titles for a teenager to amass.
Ironically, the first one of her projects to release in those post-teenage years was the biggest and most high-profile by far, with Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man exploding into cinemas and shattering countless box office records after arriving on May 3rd, 2002, which came just three days after Dunst had turned 20.
She’d only decided to audition in the first place after hearing Tobey Maguire had been cast as Peter Parker, and after an exhaustive casting search that drew in Kate Bosworth, Elizabeth Banks, Kate Hudson, Eliza Dushku, Mena Suvari, Jaimie King, Alicia Witt, and countless more, Dunst signed on the dotted line as Mary Jane Watson.
As an action-packed comic book adaptation, the star was completely aware there was going to be intense training required to pull off some of the movie’s riskier stunts, especially when Raimi was planning to shoot as many of the set pieces as possible without having to rely on extensive CGI. Despite that, one scene proved to be a step too far, with Dunst refusing to do it more than once.
In the film, there’s a moment where Mary Jane is dropped from a great height and plummets rapidly to the ground below. Dunst was game to at least give it a shot, but that was more than enough. Having done it once, she was never even going to consider doing it again, with the camera crew missing a trick by not capturing her solitary attempt on film.
“I remember once with Spider-Man, they kept at me with this one stunt where they strung me to the top of the ceiling and basically I bungee jumped,” she explained. “I didn’t really want to do it, and when I tried it I said, ‘Well, you should’ve shot that because I’m never doing it again. You’ll have to find another way.'” To overcome her reticence, a combination of stunt doubles and digital trickery was used, and the audience didn’t even notice it wasn’t Dunst performing the risky fall.
Fair play to the actor for standing her ground, and it’s not as if anyone can say she flat-out refused to do it, either; it was just the sort of experience she’d rather not relive.
