“I haven’t worked in two years. Every role I was being offered was the sad mom”
It’s 2pm on a drizzly Thursday in Hollywood, and I’m rug shopping with Kirsten Dunst. In the grand tradition of celebrity profile activities – yoga, pottery, picking at salads at iconic hotels – I meet the Oscar-nominated actor and millennial touchstone at Nickey Kehoe, the chic cottagecore interiors institution filled with splattered dishware, squirrel salt-and-pepper shakers and vintage floral pillows.
This experience should be at least a little awkward, but Dunst (who turns 42 on April 30) makes it instantly, almost bizarrely, normal. After going in for the hug, she admits with the intimacy of an old friend that she’s kind of tired. I ask why, then start to answer my own question at the same time she does: “Children.”
In the middle of the night, her two-year-old son, James, burst into her bedroom, demanding she make space for him in bed. A fellow survivalist parent, Dunst lets James sleep next to her while her husband, actor Jesse Plemons, is in New York. She enjoys the coziness, even his “stinky breath”. But then her ageing beagle also woke her, needing to be let out. Dunst has a similarly relatable approach to the couple’s eldest son, five-year-old Ennis: “Look, he’s eating three lollipops at once,” she later showcases the camera roll evidence. “He discovered Weird Mario on YouTube.”
We only just met beside an ochre velvet couch, but I understand why Dunst suggested this luxuriously twee venue. When you have two kids under six, an unencumbered rug-hunting jaunt counts as an indulgence. “I’m, like, a Volvo soccer mom right now,” she says of her current phase of life. “Selfishly, I was just like, I want to go shopping.”
Dunst sets aside the small woven rug she came for, plus a butter dish topped with a tiny ceramic bluebird and some striped hand towels that fit her antique aesthetic. “They already look dirty, which is nice,” she says. The gracious salespeople’s eyes brighten ever-so-slightly at the sight of her, but they treat her normally. Dunst seems to want to downplay herself, too. She’s wearing a red jumper that she pointedly tells me has a hole in it, wide-leg Levi’s khakis cuffed at the ankle that reveal white socks (“These are from Amazon,” she says, lifting her foot) and gifted high-end loafers. “I don’t
