Kirsten Dunst On The Name She Was Called On The ‘Spider-Man’ Set & The “Sad Mom” Roles She Was Offered After ‘The Power Of The Dog’

Kirsten Dunst is looking back at her time on the Spider-Man set, wishing she would’ve stood up for herself.

The actress that starred as Mary Jane Watson in the Sam Raimi Spider-Man trilogy starting in 2002, had a nickname on the set that she was not fond of. Dunst was referred to as “girly-girl,” and that’s how she was referred to throughout the filming of the trilogy.

“It was a joke, but on Spider-Man, they would call me ‘girly-girl’ sometimes on the walkie-talkie,” Dunst said in an interview with Marie Claire. “But I never said anything … Like, don’t call me that.”

Before the #MeToo movement in 2017, one of the unspoken rules in Hollywood was that young women kept quiet, with Dunst saying, “You didn’t say anything. You just took it.”

Dunst also talked about the roles being offered to her after starring in Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog, for which she earned an Oscar nomination. However, after the 2021 film, Dunst took a two-year break until the release of Civil War, and that’s due to the roles she was being offered.

“Every role I was being offered was the sad mom,” she told the publication.

“To be honest, that’s been hard for me…because 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,” she said of her two-year break. “There’s definitely less good roles for women my age.”

Dunst, who will turn 42 this year, was asked if she really felt her roles were limited now at her age, adding, “Yes, that’s why I did Civil War.”

In the Alex Garland film, Dunst plays a reporter who travels across the U.S. with a group of colleagues during an escalating Second American Civil War. Dunst co-stars with Warner Moura, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Cailee Spaeny, Nick Offerman, Jefferson White, Jesse Plemons, among others.