Kirsten Dunst talks about her role as Spider-Man’s woman
Just hanging on the phone with my new girlfriend, Kirsten Dunst. Not girlfriend girlfriend. Just, you know, girl friend. We’re talking hair. We have so much in common. I’m going bald. She’s a bona fide natural, one of the sharpest, least-affected actresses of her generation. She recently turned 20. Her big movie, “Spider-Man,” has opened to huge crowds.
Dunston plays Mary Jane Watson, love interest of Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire), a.k.a. Spider-Man. Sam Raimi (“A Simple Plan”) directed. He has good taste. To paraphrase the opening song of her best movie, “Bring It On” (2000), Dunst is “sexy, cute and popular to boot. She’s got “great hair, the boys all love to stare.”
In life she’s blonde; in “Spider-Man,” a redhead.
Wig?
“Wig. In the next movie I definitely want to dye my own hair.”
Have you seen the Mary Jane action figure? Creepy!
“Yeah,” she says. She talks in a cheery rush. “She has red hair. But she’s doesn’t really look like me, so it doesn’t freak me out. But you should have seen some of the faces they sent me. … I think they have to stick to certain restrictions of the doll formula. But it’s kind of good that way because then it’s not too freaky. It’s weird, but I knew what was coming with this film.”
Like how Natalie Portman knew “Star Wars” would chew up her career for five years when she committed to George Lucas.
“Yeah, I knew it, too,” Dunst said. Along with Raimi and Maguire, she’s already agreed to take part in the planned sequels. “Three films, you’re signed up, baby. You don’t like the role, you shouldn’t be signing up. But I’ve read a lot of (scripts) for these superhero films and most of them aren’t like ‘Spider-Man.’ I feel he’s relatable.”
He’s Peter Parker, high school nerd, uncertain if he should capitalize on his arachnid powers or use them to fight crime. Simply: Mary Jane is his love interest, created in the 1960s by Marvel Comics artist Stan Lee.
“There was not much research,” Dunst said. Reading comics was about it. “(Mary Jane) is always like, ‘Hey, let’s go down to the disco, Tiger!’ She’s pretty ditzy.”
Dunst said she wouldn’t have taken the role if that’s all her character was, though. So in the movie, unlike in the comic book, Mary Jane and Peter have history. They grew up neighbors. Her family life is a shambles. She has a less than stellar selection of boyfriends.
Dunst says she’s not worried about being identified as the incarnation of 40 years of adolescent fantasies. It’s the voice of a young actress whose star is still rising. She says she’s already had a “long career.” She grew up in New Jersey and actually has had something of a long career. Her first film role was in Woody Allen’s segment of “New York Stories” (1989); a few years later she was playing a tiny vampire, kissing Brad Pitt in “Interview With a Vampire” (1994); a few years after that she became a teen movie queen, starring in “The Virgin Suicides” and “Bring It On”.
She currently holds together Peter Bogdanovich’s uneven “Cat’s Meow,” her first real starring role in an adult movie; but it’s “Spider-Man,” her first blockbuster, that is so humane and effervescent, it magnifies Dunst’s charm while keeping it intact. Take The Big Kiss: Mary Jane is in danger. Spider-Man swings to the rescue. She calls after him. He drops back into view, upside down. She rolls the bottom of his mask down and, mouths inverted, they kiss.
“(Maguire) couldn’t breathe,” she said. He’d dangle from his phony web, with a studio rain pouring down around them. For hours. She’d roll his mask down to his nose, cutting off the actor’s nostrils. Then she’d kiss him, which cut off Maguire’s other option for breathing: his mouth.
“He’d go, like” – she mimics the sound of a kiss – “mm-mm-mm. Then I was like, mm-mm-mm. But then he’s like, trying to breathe out of the side of his mouth in a way? It was really unromantic, but it looked really good.”
Resuscitation as turn-on. Anyway. Lots of stunts.
“Yeah. But let’s just set the record straight. I did just as much as he did,” she says. “I worked my butt off. I did so many stunts. I just didn’t have a mask.
“While we’re swinging through the city I’m like, ‘Oh, this is so wonderful,’ but we’re really like in this really uncomfortable position. It has to look like we’re flying but we’re just stagnant and there was wind blowing on us and we’re looking around.
“You really feel like an idiot sometimes, but you just have to commit… . I’m the damsel in distress and I’m always in peril. At the end of the day, I’d be like, ‘Sam, I can’t even talk right now’ because I’d been screaming all day and it was so hard for me because I would just keep screaming and you can’t mime screaming because then it just looks really cheesy if you do that fake thing and then add it in later and today I have kind of a sore throat too from talking. It’s either talking or screaming. What can ya do?”
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.shns.com.)