Kirsten Dunst hasn’t really done action before. She’s got the Tobey Maguire-era Spider-Man films, but for the most part she sticks to serious, non-gun-heavy cinema. She’s used to movies like her last one, The Power of the Dog, a revisionist Western that nabbed her her first Oscar nomination (ditto her husband). So when she signed up for the forthcoming Civil War, she was really not prepared for spending her workdays surrounded by loud (fake) gun shots.
In a new cover story for Marie Claire (in a bit teased out by Entertainment Weekly), the actress said she was initially pumped to do the film, about a dystopian future in which the nation is being torn asunder by dueling forces, which isn’t at all relevant to what’s going on now. “When I read the script, I thought, I’ve never done anything like this,” she remembered thinking.
Shooting it was a different story. Some of the more hectic business, such as combat scenes and a car chase, she said, “shook me to my core.”
“I remember hearing them practice an explosion. We were in the hair and makeup trailer, which was very far away from set, and the whole trailer shook,” she recalled. “There’s so much gunfire, and then you look at the news and it’s a school shooting again.”
Dunst said she “had PTSD for a good two weeks after.” She added, “I remember coming home and eating lunch and I felt really empty.” But perhaps that was what helped her performance, as a journalist caught in the middle of warfare. Alex Garland, the film’s writer-director (also of Ex Machina and Annihilation), wanted her to “let herself live inside the film, and feel the reality of the moments.”
On the other hand doing a big, violent, overly topical movie with lots of guns was a relief from the kinds of scripts she’d been getting. Since she’s a woman actress in her early 40s, she lamented that “every role I was being offered was the sad mom.”
Civil War hit theaters on March 14.
(Via Marie Claire and EW)