Kirsten Dunst Reveals the ‘Spider-Man’ Nickname She Didn’t Like: ‘Don’t Call Me That’
Kirsten Dunst, who played Mary Jane Watson in the iconic Spider-Man trilogy, still isn’t over the nickname she was given on set.
"It was a joke, but on Spider-Man, they would call me 'girly-girl' sometimes on the walkie-talkie. 'We need girly-girl,’” Dunst, 41, shared in an interview with Marie Claire published on Tuesday, March 5, mimicking a staticky radio sound.
Dunst noted that she “never said anything” and “just took it,” but after reliving the memory, she said, “Like, don’t call me that.”
In the same interview, Dunst claimed that she hasn’t worked for the past two years because "every role I was being offered was the sad mom.” Her next film, a political thriller titled Civil War, is set to premiere this month and wrapped production in 2022.
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"To be honest, that's been hard for me,” Dunst said of not working, adding, “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."
Dunst told Marie Claire that she chose not to "capitalize off the Spider-Man thing" to become a "movie-star-movie-star," explaining that route is “great for some people” but “it’s not the artist that I want to be.”
Instead, the actress dove into more artistic indie projects, including Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette and Melancholia. In 2021, she starred opposite her husband, Jesse Plemons, and Benedict Cumberbatch in Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog, for which she received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress.
Dunst explained her preference for working with women behind the scenes, recalling a conversation with her manager where she expressed concerns about male directors seeing her as “someone they might want to sleep with.” She told the outlet, "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."
Dunst has also enjoyed working with Plemons, 35, whom she wed in 2022.
“Acting is a natural extension of their relationship,” a source exclusively told Us Weekly in January about the couple’s interest in sharing the screen.
According to the insider, Dunst and Plemons “get to take themselves out of their comfort zones and collaborate as a team, which is a lot of fun for them.”
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The couple started dating after they met on the set of Fargo in 2015. They share sons Ennis, 5, and James, 2. Along with costarring in The Power of the Dog, the pair will appear together in Civil War.
In November 2021, Dunst revealed on Jimmy Kimmy Live! that the twosome “kind of fell in love creatively first and fell in love as actors. We got together after [Fargo] … I just knew he was awesome and that we were about to work together.”
She continued: “I watched all of Friday Night Lights for the first time. We were cold in Calgary, and there wasn’t much to do so I went on a Jesse Plemons [binge]. [But] I have not seen [Breaking Bad] and I feel weird about it. That’s the last thing he wants to watch with me.”
