Award-winning actress Kirtsen Dunst found an “idyllic” life as a kid in Bricktown, but moved west to take the reins as one of those most dependable character actors in the business. She discusses recent roles in FX’s Fargo and her upcoming film Midnight Special

by Industry staff

One is tempted to think that there’s something in Garden State water that gives rise to good movie acting chops… so robust are our ranks of Jersey-born stars. There’s Meryl Streep (from Summit), John Travolta (Englewood), Tom Cruise (Glen Ridge), Anne Hathaway (Millburn), Susan Sarandon (Edison), Mira Sorvino (Tenafly), and dozens of others.

It’s comparatively rarely, however, that you’ll hear them describe upbringings here as “idyllic,” but that’s exactly how Canne Film Festival Best Actress award winner Kirsten Dunst describes it.

“I went to Ranney School [in Tinton Falls] and grew up on the Manasquan River in Bricktown,” Dunst once offered in an interview with NorthJersey.com. “My grandparents lived in Point Pleasant, and my cousins were in Brielle…I really had an idyllic childhood. My grandma lived on an inlet off the bay, and we had summers on the beach and the boardwalk. I lived on a double cul-de-sac and it was so safe for kids. My best friend lived across the street. I literally grew up how every kid wishes to grow up.”

Not only is her home state cherished by the 33-year-old star of FX’s series Fargo—which wrapped its second-season broadcast run on December 14 but is downloadable on Hulu or on FX’s app—it occasionally needs defending. In a famous dust-up during the 2010 second season of Jersey Shore, Dunst, seemingly offended by the show’s depiction of Shore residents as more than slightly lacking in the grey matter department, quipped of the MTV show’s cast that, “None of those people are from New Jersey! I’m from New Jersey …they’re not from New Jersey!”

The actress, who now divides her time between coasts, was a student at Tinton Falls’s Ranney School (fellow notable students include The Voice contestant Jacquie Lee and Bruce Springsteen’s daughter Jessica Springsteen) through the fifth rade, when she relocated to California in the wake of her parents’ separation, but by then was already and up-and-coming star. Her first film role was in Woody Allen’s short film Oedipus Wrecks, one-third of the 1989 anthology film New York Stories, followed swiftly by parts in The Bonfire of the Vanities, High Strung, and Greedy, before she took the role of a pre-teen blood sucker in 1994’s Interview with the Vampire. The last performance earned her a Golden Globe Award nomination as best supporting actress…at an astonishing 12 years of age.

There have been no fewer than 44 starring turns since, in films like Wag the Dog (1997), The Virgin Suicides (1999), Spider-Man, Spider-Man 2, and Spider-Man 3 (2002, 2004, and 2007), Melancholia (2011, and for which she took home a Golden Globe as Best Actress), and 2013’s Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues. She made her directorial debut with the short film Welcome, starring Winona Ryder, which screened at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, followed by Bastard, which she directed and co-wrote. The film, which stars Juno Temple and Brian Geraghty, was accepted into the 2010 Tribeca and Cannes Film Festivals.

There have been TV parts, too, but the closest Dunst came to being a series regular was a six-episode stint in the 1996-97 third season of ER, in which she played a teenage prostitute being worried over by series star George Clooney. That changed last year, however, when she took the role of small town beautician Peggy Blumquist in Fargo. The storyline features Lou Solverson (Patrick Wilson), a young state trooper recently back from Vietnam, who investigates a case involving a local crime gang, a major mob syndicate, Blumquist, and her husband Ed (Jesse Plemons), who is the local butcher’s assistant. Helping Lou piece things together is his father-in-law, Sheriff Hank Larsson (Ted Danson). The investigation leads them to a colorful cast of characters that includes Karl Weathers (Nick Offerman), the town lawyer of Luverne, Minnesota. Emmy Award winning Executive Producers Noah Hawley, Joel and Ethan Coen, Warren Littlefield, and John Cameron all returned for the second installment, and the show was produced by MGM Television and FX Productions, with MGM serving as the lead studio. For her efforts, Dunst has already grabbed a Critics Choice Television Award for Best Actress in a Movie Made for Television or Limited Series, and is nominated for a best actress Golden Globe Award.

“I knew I was meeting with Noah, and hadn’t watched the series yet, so I binge watched it in a day,” offered Dunst at a Fargo press conference at the Beverly Hilton in Beverly Hills. “I was just so blown away by the acting and writing and the way it looked. And, then, I read two of the [new] episodes, and I just thought, ‘Wow, this character is going to go places, and I need to play her.’ Peggy is legendary.”

Asked further about her character, the actor observed that, “Peggy has set goals for herself, and nothing is going to stop her. And I don’t think it’s about being smart or oblivious. It’s about being…I don’t want to call her delusional, but she has such a zeroed-in path of what she wants to do and what she wants to be.”

“A lot of my family is from Minnesota…half of my background is those people,” she continued. “And my grandma…she was born and bred there. So it’s kind of within my wheelhouse already, and it was very familiar to me to step into that accent and that…you know, Lutheran, ‘Keep your chin up and smile even though all this other stuff is happening’ outlook…to keep up a good face.”

The movie roles also keep coming. Scheduled for a mid- March premiere at the South by Southwest Film Festival is the already highly-acclaimed Midnight Special (IMDB 7.2 rating). Writer/director Jeff Nichols’s film is an at once a supernatural thriller and enigmatic and thought-provoking cross-country chase into the unknown…and the unknowable. The film describes the run-for-his-live journey of a young boy named Alton Meyer, who can access highly technical classified information as effortlessly as tuning a television. These powers make him the prized possession of a religious cult that believes he’s receiving messages from the divine and, more recently, the object of a federal manhunt, as word reaches the highest levels of government that an 8-year-old is intercepting top-secret military satellite transmissions.

Traveling with Alton are his dad, Roy, played by Michael Shannon, and Roy’s childhood friend Lucas, played by Joel Edgerton. Along the way they enlist the support of Alton’s mother, Roy’s ex-wife Sarah (played by Dunst). Barely a step behind are the police and the FBI, as well as the NSA in the form of agent Sevier (played by Adam Driver), along with the single-minded devotees of the Third Heaven Ranch, led by Sam Shepard as the charismatic and cagey Calvin.

“Subdued,” is how Dunst described her character, a former Third Heaven Ranch member. “Sarah has lived in solitude for so long, has been so lonely and so sad, and that does something to a person. It affects everything. Jeff and I talked about how to integrate that into the role so that it felt real.” Still, she said,

“I read two of the [new Fargo] episodes, and I just thought, ‘Wow, this character is going to go places, and I need to play her.’ Peggy is legendary.”

“I think when she and Alton see each other again, there’s no doubt this is his mother. They come together immediately and it doesn’t matter what happened or how long it’s been. All she wants is for her son to be who he is and where he needs to be.”

“I wanted to make a chase movie, a movie about guys moving on back roads through the American South in a fast car, driving at night with their lights off,” Nichols explained. “They’re on the run, they’re being hunted and, at the same time, they’re racing towards something important, though we don’t immediately know what it is.”

Before the film was in production, in fact before it was even a script, certain of its moments took shape in Nichols’s imagination, one of which was an image of Sarah that he said Dunst now embodies. “I dreamt of this shot, of her sitting on the stoop of a house with the camera slightly low and the porch bulb lighting the back of her head. I had that in my head for years, and Kirsten suited it perfectly.”

Though no longer a Ranch member, Sarah continues to dress in its traditional, modest manner, showing very little skin and keeping her hair in a long braid. Being attired in this way, Nichols explained, serves to underscore what she feels is right, no matter the shifting circumstances of her life.

“It can be a risky narrative move to begin with the relationship between a father and child and then, midway through, shift to the mother and child,” added Nichols. “You need to understand what they’re going through, and you see all of that on her face. Kirsten’s very good at getting into the emotion of a scene.”