Kirsten Dunst Didn’t Act for Two Years Because She Was Only Offered ‘Sad Mom’ Roles

By Emma Chance | Celebrity | March 6, 2024 |

By Emma Chance | Celebrity | March 6, 2024 |

“I haven’t worked in two years,” Kirsten Dunst told Marie Claire in an interview about her recent film Civil War. After her Oscar-nominated performance in The Power of the Dog, “every role I was being offered was the sad mom,” she explained.

It was frustrating to be type-cast that way, especially when she’d recently become a mother herself. Not that she was a sad one, but still.

“To be honest, that’s been hard for me … because I need to feed myself. The hardest thing is being a mom and … not feeling like, I have nothing for myself. That’s every mother—not just me.”

But roles for women over 40 are, unfortunately, few and far between. “There’s definitely less good roles for women my age,” she said. And she’s only 41.

“That’s why I did Civil War. When I read the script, I thought, I’ve never done anything like this.” “This” being what she refers to as “elevated action.” But she says that action “shook me to my core” and gave her “PTSD for a good two weeks” after.

Still, she doesn’t hate that she has a reputation for flying under the radar.

“I think it’s good to be an underdog. If you [win] Academy Awards, sometimes it’s not always good for your career,” she said. She explained she consciously didn’t “capitalize off the Spider-Man thing” because she didn’t want the “movie-star-movie-star” level of fame.

“That’s great for some people. It’s not the artist that I want to be.”

She resisted rom-coms, instead picking roles that spoke to her emotionally, explaining, “I always just navigated with my heart.” Now, she says she doesn’t get nervous on set and feels “at home sharing everything.” But she didn’t always feel that way. Just like Kate Winslet, she said she didn’t know how to stand up for herself when she was a young actress.

“It was a joke, but on Spider-Man, they would call me ‘girly-girl’ sometimes on the walkie-talkie. ‘We need girly-girl,’ but I never said anything.”

“Like, don’t call me that,” she thinks now, but back then, “You didn’t say anything. You just took it.”

She admitted that at one point in her career, she told her manager, “I feel like I get hired because I’m someone that they might want to sleep with,” of male directors.

“I think that’s probably why I migrated to so many female directors at a younger age, because I didn’t want to feel that way.”

But she’s also willing to admit that she would do another superhero movie if given the chance.

“Because you get paid a lot of money, and I have two children, and I support my mother.”

Unfortunately, she’ll probably have to play Peter Parker’s sad mom.