On the hottest day in recent memory, Kirsten Dunst is in no mood to shop. Her shoulders—exposed in a cotton shell—are turning pink, a paparazzo is maybe hiding behind that car, and she’d really like to sit down. “I need to decompress,” Dunst says. The reasons for that will soon become clear.
The plan was to go shopping for toys. It’s a bit of a gimmick: This fall Dunst stars opposite Channing Tatum in Roofman, a ripped-from-the-headlines story about an escaped convict who spends months hiding out inside a Toys R Us. Dunst plays Leigh Wainscott, the newly divorced, churchgoing store employee he falls in love with, apparently despite her employee uniform, which Dunst deems “not flattering” but right for the film.
If you don’t have kids—or you hire someone to do your holiday shopping—you may be surprised to find out that Toys R Us doesn’t exist anymore. At least, not the way you remember. There is one in Los Angeles, Dunst reports, but “it’s in the basement of a Macy’s.” She has been there to buy gifts and, well, “it’s a lot of sad dads sitting in the furniture department waiting.” Her description is so ripe with malaise it’s like a John Cheever story written for X.
So we visit a mom-and-pop toy shop, where Dunst picks up a Magic 8 Ball for her sons Ennis, seven, and James, four. She tells me that when she and her husband, the actor Jesse Plemons, recently saw a rough cut of Roofman, they kept turning to each other as if to say, “This is great, right?”
“I haven’t felt that way leaving a theater in a long time,” Dunst says. She praises Tatum (who “moves like a dancer”) and adds, “It’s like a Hal Ashby movie.”
Dunst, 43, is an actress promoting a project—what is she supposed to say?—but a moment later she’s very much not. She admits to checking her phone during one screening of the film, not because she was bored but because of a family health crisis that happened a few months ago, which she’s still contending with. “I wanted to make sure everything was okay,” she says.
I’m not sure she intended to talk about this, but it comes up quickly, because it’s on her mind and she’s incapable of lying. That honesty has always been her superpower. In her work, as a teenager-on-the-verge in Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides (which celebrates its 25th anniversary this year) to an alcoholic mother in 2021’s The Power of the Dog (for which Dunst received a long-overdue Oscar nomination), she has not just aged along with us, she has held a mirror up to our messy lives at every turn. She’s a muse for Rodarte, chic but not untouchable, and a fixture on every cool girl’s mood board. Yet for all the eyes on her, she hasn’t gone internal; she’s still watching you, becoming our foremost interpreter of the complexities of the human experience.
That she has left such a mark on Hollywood is even more impressive considering that she sometimes takes years between projects and works almost exclusively with auteurs. Dunst has been in exactly one film since The Power of the Dog, Alex Garland’s Civil War, a dark commentary that came out during the most divisive election year in recent memory yet still broke records for A24. Dunst wasn’t biding her time, waiting for something light to come along, she was waiting “for the right director to ask.” That job—a film in Budapest—turned out to be the kind of artistic challenge she’d been craving. But little else went according to plan.
The last time I interviewed Dunst was in 2017. She was newly engaged, having met Plemons while making FX’s Fargo, for which they were both nominated for Emmys, and she was promoting The Beguiled, her third collaboration with Coppola. We walked around the Descanso Gardens in L.A., Dunst loose and free and in love, and contemplating a move to Austin, Texas, where Plemons had a house.
A lot has happened to her since then, both personally and professionally, though the changes in her life can be summarized in one fact: She had to take an Uber to today’s interview because the babysitter needed Dunst’s car. “I drive a Volvo with two car seats in the back,” she says. “It’s our adult car.” What does Jesse drive? “His family’s old Lexus—with no car seats.”
Dunst has just returned from six months abroad filming The Entertainment System Is Down, director Ruben Ostlund’s followup to Triangle of Sadness. She says she didn’t think she’d get the part. “Ruben was going to hire European actors,” she says. We’re walking in Studio City, not far from where she and her mother lived when they moved from New Jersey to L.A. more than 30 years ago so Kirsten could pursue acting. (She made her debut in Woody Allen’s New York Stories before Interview with a Vampire made her a star at 11.) So Dunst auditioned for Ostlund, recording herself on an iPhone in her guesthouse.
There was no dialogue on the page, really, so she had been asked to improvise a scene: You’re on a long flight, the entertainment system isn’t working, you break into your husband’s phone, and you discover he’s been cheating—which is a major plot point. Over the course of a single flight, the couple engage in a lifetime’s worth of marital discourse. Dunst is quick to assert that infidelity is not part of her own story, but she admits that the film, which takes place almost entirely on the plane, let her “act out the worst parts of my personality.”
“Things that you don’t get to explore in your real life,” as she puts it. “I got to vomit onscreen. I was able to express my rage and also my bitchiness.” How did it feel? “It felt great!” Ostlund, who is editing the film now, tells me that Dunst is a genius, adding, “Kirsten doesn’t have a single frame of dishonesty. She’s there 100 percent.”
Dunst’s time abroad quickly became every parent’s nightmare. Plemons and their two boys had joined her in January, and the plan was for everyone to stay for the duration. They had rented a house in Budapest and enrolled Ennis in school. But very quickly their younger son, James, had a serious health scare. Dunst won’t go into the details, and she stresses that everyone is fine now. But it was an extremely frightening time and enough to send the family back to their extended support system in L.A.
So Dunst was alone in Budapest for months; she would unwind after a long day by watching a certain British cooking show, grateful for the seemingly endless kitchen competition. But the separation was challenging. She went home briefly in April, but the fear lingered. She invokes the movie “Final Destination, where you’re imagining all the things that could go wrong, worst case scenarios happening to your child.”
“I have never seen that movie,” she clarifies, and I laugh. “But I know the concept. That’s how it feels to be a mother at times.”
I wonder if that near tragedy confirmed that she had chosen the right partner. She says she already knew that about Plemons, adding that “it brought us together as a family in such a deeper way.” She tells me they’re leaving soon for the Bahamas, having promised to take the boys on vacation, “anywhere James wanted to go.” His request: “I want to go to a beach where my sandcastle won’t wash away.”
“Your forties is such a hard decade,” Dunst says, tucking into a slice of pizza after the café we’d intended to visit turned out to be closed. A flawless game plan has never been her vibe. For years Dunst has supported her mother, a woman whose house burned down last fall, she says, thanks to a citronella candle left burning outside, which warded off mosquitoes but attracted the fire department.
“Now she’s living with us,” Dunst says, in the guesthouse where she recorded that audition, the hum of the kitchen’s exhaust fan inadvertently making it sound as if Dunst was actually on an airplane.
She’s not complaining. It’s a gift to spend time with family, she says. But, you know, life. She says that in a roundabout way this is why she rarely looks at Instagram, and certainly never in the morning. When she opens the app she thinks, Why does everyone look so good? And why is everyone on vacation? What’s Dunst doing? Surely something enviable? “I’m at home watching Jeopardy with my mom and feeding my kid a hot dog.” Recently, she says, she went shopping at the Row because she’d been wearing the same sweatpants for months, but also for some self-care. She uncharacteristically told herself: Buy anything you want.
What did Dunst worry about in her twenties? “Nothing!” she shouts, describing Coppola’s Marie Antoinette as her semester abroad. At the wrap party, she says, she and a childhood friend ended up in a fountain in the gardens at Versailles—“with no security. When does that happen?”
Years ago Dunst—who had written and directed two short films—was talking about directing her first feature, even soft-announcing an adaptation of The Bell Jar. Today that idea feels like a luxurious joke. “Maybe when I’m in my sixties,” she says of directing. “It’s such an all-encompassing job.” Dunst has a few projects she’s set to star in (including a mermaid story with Anora’s Mikey Madison), and she tells me she has just read the script for Coppola’s next film, which they’ll make together next year. But she’d also really like to be in Minecraft 2, she says, because her kids loved the first one and because she’d like to make a pile of cash. “Maybe I can just make a movie where I don’t lose money?”
Roofman didn’t have a large budget, and what it did have went into building a fully stocked replica of a Toys R Us in North Carolina, Dunst says. Her kids still wear pajamas she “borrowed” from the fake store. That disarming, relatable honesty is one of the reasons the film’s director, Derek Cianfrance, wanted her for the movie; Dunst understood on a cellular level that parenthood is about being selfless, he says. Over the years he says he has realized that “acting isn’t about faking it. It’s about telling the truth.” The more time you spend with Dunst, the more you realize this life is a gift. But none of it is easy, and walking the red carpet at the Golden Globes in January or attending a Parisian ball at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in July—that’s the part that feels like acting.
“Kirsten makes cool choices. She’s never hokey,” Coppola says. “She can be fully sincere and in touch with emotions without ever being embarrassing. I love working with her and I know she gets me, and I’m excited for her to be the age she is now… I feel like she’s in her Gena Rowlands age and can do complex roles.”
Dunst is proud of the films she has made with Coppola and their impact. Marie Antoinette was not a hit initially, and the reaction felt personal. Dunst loved the movie and thought, What am I missing? What’s the disconnect? Now her friends’ kids are watching it and sending her questions—a beautiful “full circle moment.” Similarly, when she and Coppola appeared together at a 25th-anniversary screening of The Virgin Suicides, she was floored by the response. “Some fans had been there since 4:30 in the morning” she says. “It’s wonderful that that movie lives on and it means something to young women.”
At its heart, Roofman is about a crook who has made mistakes but is just trying to provide for his family. That’s an idea Dunst latched onto early on. For years her creative process has included doing “dream work” to explore her subconscious and connect with her characters. For Fargo, she dreamed about Scooby-Doo, which inspired her character’s shuffling walk. For Roofman she had a vision of Christmas. For each scene she gave Cianfrance what she calls a “Christmas take,” one in which she imagined she was starring in a holiday movie.
According to Cianfrance, Dunst was one of the first people to figure out that giving gifts (stolen or otherwise) was this criminal’s love language, and that the script was in fact a sneaky Christmas flick. “I was thinking a lot about Frank Capra movies,” Cianfrance says, invoking movies that “have a different magic to them.”
He later tells me he met Dunst in 2014 about another project but ultimately didn’t cast her, concerned that she might not be able do an Australian accent. He now admits that was misguided: “Kirsten can do anything.”
With Roofman, Dunst wanted to capture something “authentic and a little sparkly,” she says, describing the “drama of Christmas movies and not getting what you wish for and the heartbreak.” To make a movie that’s sweet but not saccharine, to make something so full of life, where so much can go wrong. “It’s the hardest thing,” she says.
Photographs by Tina Tyrell
Styled by Deborah Afshani
Hair by Danilo for Color Wow Dream Cocktail and Philip B. Repair Spray at the Wall Group. Makeup by Nina Park for Chanel Beauty at Kalpana. Nails by Emi Kudo for Chanel at A-Frame Agency. Set design by Din Morris. Production by Viewfindersnyla.
In the top image: Balenciaga dress. Van Cleef & Arpels Bouton d’Or earrings, endless ribbon necklace, and A Cheval 5 rows bracelet.
This story appears in the September 2025 issue of Town & Country.
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Mickey Rapkin is a journalist and screenwriter whose first book, Pitch Perfect, inspired the film series. Previously a senior editor at GQ, he has written for The New York Times, WSJ, and National Geographic. He lives in Los Angeles.
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