Kirsten Dunst's criticisms affected her and she decided to get away from the industry, although that was not her only reason.
Kirsten Dunst acknowledged that she had difficulties presenting Spider-Man 3 because she, before shooting the film, made another one that was brutally criticized by fans. In fact, among her confessions, she declared that she was willing to move away from acting for good.
Marie Antoinette was a pivotal film in Dunst's filmography; Not only because it was very different from other projects she had been working on, but also because it made her rethink her career.
The film was directed by filmmaker Sofia Coppola in 2006 and deals with the historical drama that followed Queen Marie Antoinette through the years before her fate amid the French Revolution.
For Coppola, Dunst was the first actress that came to mind when he came up with the idea. "I thought of Kirsten while I was writing the script because I had just worked with her and I loved the experience," Coppola told Vogue. "She just has that spark that I imagine Marie Antoinette had."
After meeting personally with Sofia Coppola, Dunst decided to play the titular character. However, when the film was released in 2006, it did not have the reception they had hoped for. The film was screened at the Cannes Film Festival, and the actress was on hand as she saw firsthand how others responded to the film.
"There were no more than six of them, but it was like they took a shit in the movie. I was so angry at the way people were talking about her and sick of this whole thing. The movie was personal to me. It was like the whole world was trampled," he once told the Daily Mail.
Such a situation had consequences for her performance in Spider-Man 3, where she gave life to Mary Jane Watson. "I suffered a lot during the filming of Spider-Man 3," she said. "Then I stopped acting. I was sick of giving myself to other people because I had nothing in my life that was all mine."
Other reasons to take a break
Marie Antoinette wasn't the only reason Dunst was unhappy with her acting career. Growing up in her spotlight, she began to notice and resent how the film industry was shaping her as a person.
"It's not a natural way to grow up, and acting was never a dream for me because it had always been a part of me. It was all I knew, it was just my life," the actress said.
This was one of the reasons why Dunst swore not to subject any of her future children to the pressures of the cinema. "I would never put any of my children to act because, although I loved acting and was happy working as a child, looking back, my happiness always came from pleasing other people, always. It came from satisfying the director, my mother, or my teacher. of interpretation, not of pleasing myself," she explains.
However, Marie Antoinette did not mark the end of Kirsten Dunst's career, which would continue to flourish in subsequent years, and when she was ready to return to acting, she wanted to do it her way.
