Kirsten Dunst: Ready to Go Wild For “Bachelorette”

The actress was ready to reclaim her comedy cred after “Melancholia.”

Kirsten Dunst was desperately serious about getting silly again.

The 30-year-old actress got deep, dark and disturbed for her last film “Melancholia” – director Lars von Trier’s broody, sci-fi exploration of depression – and earned the Cannes Film Festival’s Best Actress Award for her risky performance. But after waiting for the end of the world, Dunst was in major mood-lightening mode.

Thus she embraced the raunchy, raucous comedy “Bachelorette,” joining Isla Fisher and Lizzie Caplan in a wild-pre-wedding romp. The film’s already caught the wave of the current “ladies can be just as crass as the guys” zeitgeist, reaching the top VOD spot on iTunes before it’s even hit theaters. Dunst tells NBC exclusively about returning to her comedy roots, her first trip to a strip club and her thoughts after seeing the most recent Spider-Man film.

Were you looking for something fun to do, especially as a palette-cleanser after ‘Melancholia’?

After ‘Melancholia,’ I was like, ‘I want to be in a comedy! I want to have fun! I do not want to delve deep into my soul.’ So, I was looking for it, yeah, a comedy, and it’s hard sometimes because I did a lot of comedies when I was younger, but nobody saw me as that. They didn’t think of me as a comedy girl, so it wasn’t that easy to find, and then this came along and it was perfect. I met with Leslye [Headland, the writer-director] and hit it off with her, and even though this was her first movie, I just felt the energy that she would be a good director. She’s very strong and confident, and also very smart, so I wasn’t worried.

You do have a ton of comedies to your credit. How did you drift away from it?

It was more when I was younger. Maybe because as you get older, the roles – mostly in the bigger comedies – are smaller parts for women, because it’s usually a male comedy. So it’s usually playing, like, just the girlfriend, which isn’t fun.

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Kirsten Dunst: “I’m very chill these days”

Kirsten Dunst, 30, is a lot more relaxed than she was in her earlier years, and jokes about her tortured younger days. She’s looking glamorous at the Cannes Film Festival promoting On The Road, in which she stars opposite Viggo Mortensen and Kristen Stewart. Romantically, she is reportedly single. Her previous relationships include Jake Gyllenhaal, and musician Johnny Borrell of Razorlight. Dunst lives a low key lifestyle and lives on her own in New York.

Q: How is it coming back to Cannes after the success of Melancholia last year?

It’s nice because I’m part of the history now. I’m very grateful and it’s nice to come back and feel like you are really part of Cannes now.

Q: A member of the club.

Yeah, it feels cool. It’s a really an honour. I have always been drawn to this festival and the films that they show every year. And yeah, it’s a really nice feeling.

Q: And compared to what you had to do for Melancholia, that scene was much easier?

I don’t even have a sex scene…

Q: It was a piece of cake.

(laughs) Yeah, it was nothing. This was like, ‘oh, let’s have some fun.’

Q: I was just thinking, was there a sex scene?

Post.

Q: A post sex scene.

Yeah.

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I have addd over 1300 HD screen captures of Kirstin part in the amazing Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia.

Kirsten has been nominated for Best Actress at the 38th Saturn Awards. Winners will be announced on June 20.

JESSICA CHASTAIN
Take Shelter (Sony Pictures Classics)

KIRSTEN DUNST
Melancholia (Magnolia)

ROONEY MARA
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Sony)

BRIT MARLING
Another Earth (Fox Searchlight)

KEIRA KNIGHTLEY
A Dangerous Method (Sony Pictures Classics)

ELIZABETH OLSON
Martha Marcy May Marlene (Fox Searchlight)

Check here the full list of nominees.

COLOGNE, Germany – Lars von Trier’s end-of-the-world melodrama Melancholia continues to rack up the honors, sweeping last night’s Danish Film Academy honors, the Robert awards, winning 10 trophies including best film, best director and acting prizes for stars Kirsten Dunst and Charlotte Gainsbourg.

Dunst picked up the best actress honor for her starring turn in Melancholia as a depressed bride confronting the end of days. Gainsbourg, as her more practical sister, took the best supporting actress honor. Dunst won the best acting prize in Cannes for her role.

Melancholia won best film at the European Film Awards and the National Society of Film Critics honored it with both its best film and best actress gongs. The Oscars snubbed Melancholia, though, due, perhaps, to von Trier’s controversial comments about Hitler at a press conference for the film in Cannes last year.

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Over the course of a career not much shorter than her 29 year-old life, Kirsten Dunst has covered a lot of bases — skipping gamely between fluorescent Hollywood blockbusters, handmade American indies, fizzy teen comedies, primetime television and the chillier climes of the European arthouse — but there’s one area the actress feels she’s neglected thus far.

“I really want to do a film in another language,” she says, her tone ruminative but quite serious, over the phone from Los Angeles. “My dad’s from Germany, so it’d be really cool to do a film in German. I’m not quite fluent, but I can get there. And my accent’s pretty good. I wouldn’t feel too out of my element.”

It’s not just any German film she wants to work on either: Michael Haneke, that esteemed Austrian dissector of psychological trouble, currently tops her wishlist of directors to work with in the future, a group that also include Paul Thomas Anderson and Alexander Payne. The prospect of the sunny New Jersey blonde collaborating with the frosty German-born formalist isn’t quite as unimaginable as it might have been a year or two ago, before another prickly European provocateur, Lars von Trier, showed everyone what Kirsten Dunst is made of in “Melancholia.”

There ain’t no melancholy for Melancholia star Kirsten Dunst and Moneyball, Tree of Life actor Brad Pitt!

The National Society of Film Critics honored the two stars Saturday at its 46th annual awards as Best Actress and Best Actor, as well as naming Dunst’s Melancholia, directed by iconoclast Lars von Trier, as Best Picture.

Dunst’s role in the end-of-the-world drama continues to look like an Oscar contender—the actress took Best Actress for the role at Cannes before getting the Critics nod Saturday, beating out Yun Jung-hee for her role in Poetry and Meryl Streep in The Iron Lady.

As for the allegorical film itself, Melancholia topped Pitt’s and Sean Penn‘s Tree of Life to be honored as Best Picture by the group.

But Tree of Life was strong, winning Terrence Malick the Best Director honor, and also figuring into Jessica Chastain‘s nod for Best Supporting Actress (in addition to her roles in The Help and Take Shelter).

So there were plenty of awards to go around, as long as you were Tree of Life or Melancholia, that is.

Complete List of Winners:

• Best Picture: Melancholia
• Best Director: Terrence Malick, The Tree of Life
• Best Actor:  Brad Pitt, Moneyball, The Tree of Life
• Best Actress: Kirsten Dunst, Melancholia
• Best Supporting Actor: Albert Brooks, Drive
• Best Supporting Actress: Jessica Chastain, The Tree of Life, Take Shelter, The Help
• Best Screenplay: A Separation, Asghar Farhadi
• Best Cinematography: The Tree of Life, Emmanuel Lubezki
• Best Nonfiction Film: Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Werner Herzog
• Best Foreign Language Film: A Separation, Asghar Farhadi
• Best Experimental Film: Seeking the Monkey King, Ken Jacobs

This year at Cannes, the person who squirmed sitting next to Lars von Trier at his notorious “Melancholia” Cannes press conference, during which the Danish writer-director offended just about everybody by calling himself a Nazi, was his star, Kirsten Dunst.  In the days to follow he apologized repeatedly for the “stupid, idiotic” comments that led to his banishment from the festival.

But he also had to repair the damage he had done to his relationship with Dunst.  “It was probably harder on her than anyone else,” Von Trier told me the night he was going to meet her for a makeup dinner.

Putting balm on the wound was the closing night ceremony, when Dunst gratefully accepted the best actress Palme, thanking the festival for allowing “Melancholia” to stay in competition. Afterwards she said that she should not have been punished for von Trier’s “inappropriate” comments. Nor should she. “Melancholia” starts off with Dunst’s lavish castle wedding, destroyed by the beautiful bride’s plunge into depression, followed by how she and her family deal with a planet hurtling toward a possible collision with Earth. “Melancholia” might have had a shot at the Palme d’Or won by “The Tree of Life” had it not been overshadowed by von Trier’s misbehavior. (More details on the film and a sampling of reviews are here.)

By the time of our video interview below, Dunst, who had already weathered a Cannes controversy with Sofia Coppola’s “Marie Antoinette,” had clearly forgiven her director. She was sorry to have missed a celebratory party, and clearly has learned to measure her words carefully with the media. After all, she’s been working in high-profile films since 1994’s “Interview with the Vampire” at age 12. And she’s happy to carry the promo load on “Melancholia”–as Von Trier has refused to give any more interviews. “Maybe that’s not a bad thing,” she says, laughing.

Working with Von Trier, contrary to previous reports, was “not difficult,” she says. Both had experienced depression; he opened up to her and earned her trust, she sys: “I couldn’t feel so vulnerable if I didn’t feel taken care of by Lars.”

Dunst admits that she got off easy on this one, compared to what Charlotte Gainsbourg had to do on “Anti-Christ.” She worried about her parents seeing her magnificient nude display, but her father told her it was “artistic.” “Only Lars and Pedro Almodovar write these incredible, messy roles for women,” she says. Even the department heads on the film were women: “He needs nurturing.” She would happily work with Von trier again–along with Almodovar and Michael Haneke.

While she has been heading in an indie direction since leaving the “Spider-Man” franchise, “I’m not an indie intense person at all,” she insists. In fact, she’s now shooting a dark indie comedy with Isla Fisher, “Bachelorette,” based on rookie director Leslye Hedland’s play. “We’ve lightened it,” she says. In January Dunst starts another indie adapted from the stage, Adam Rapp’s bleak drama “Red Light Winter, ” which the NYT called “a frank, graphic story of erotic fixation and the havoc it can wreak on sensitive souls.” The movie will co-star Mark Ruffalo and Billy Crudup.

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