It does not take a lot of convincing to work for Jane Campion.
“Jane came to me about playing Rose. I read the script first… but I would have played any role for Jane,” says Kirsten Dunst of how she jumped at the chance to join Campion on The Power Of The Dog, playing Rose, a beleaguered widow who marries into a ranching family. “It was a dream of mine to work with her for a long time. So when she called, I tried to be calm with her, but I freaked out to my family and friends.”
That family includes her fiancé and father of her two children, Jesse Plemons, who plays Rose’s husband George in the Netflix-backed film. Dunst explains the film’s lead actor Benedict Cumberbatch “really wanted Jesse to be cast as his brother”. She jokes, “We were a two-for-one deal, we could share a house and we often rode to work together.” More seriously, she adds regarding Plemons, “He’s the best actor and he’s my favourite actor to work with.”
Rose and George are not much like the real-life couple, who met in 2015 on the set of FX’s Fargo, the darkly comic crime drama that netted Dunst a Primetime Emmy nomination the following year. In The Power Of The Dog, the pair are half of an intense four-hander, which Campion adapted from the 1967 novel by Thomas Savage. Cumberbatch plays tough rancher Phil Burbank, who has a fraught relationship with his meek brother George, and starts to torment George’s new wife Rose and her teenage son Peter when they move into the Burbank ranch in 1920s Montana.
“Jesse and I had to be so formal with each other, which is awkward,” the actress recalls. “It’s so against my nature to be reserved with him, so that was interesting. It was funny.”
Dunst had a different approach for working with Cumberbatch, whose Phil saps the widow’s confidence and ultimately undermines her sense of self. “We didn’t have that many scenes together, so much is from a distance, he’s watching her or he’s whistling to her from upstairs,” says the actress. “We didn’t talk to each other on set, we were very reserved with each other on set. He kind of kept his distance.”
Campion is one of only seven women nominated for best director at the Oscars (for The Piano in 1994), and it is perhaps notable one of the other six, Sofia Coppola, is the filmmaker most associated with Dunst — having directed her in The Virgin Suicides(1999), Marie Antoinette (2006) and The Beguiled (2017).
Collaborating with Campion lived up to Dunst’s expectations. “Jane is someone who wants to get to the bottom of things with you,” she explains. “It’s reflective in her work and the roles she writes, especially for women. They are very real and always psychologically interesting.”
To get into the mindset, the four principal actors had a two-week rehearsal period ahead of the 2020 shoot in New Zealand. “We improvised a lot in those two weeks of rehearsal just to get the dynamics that weren’t necessarily seen on the screen,” Dunst reveals. “Like, what were those dinners really like?”
Dunst — who first appeared on screen at the age of six, and was 11 when she filmed Neil Jordan’s Interview With The Vampire— formed a special bond with Kodi Smit-McPhee, whose career started aged nine. “He’s just a kind human being and really funny,” she says of the actor, who plays her on-screen son Peter. “We immediately bonded.”
Dunst reveals they strengthened the connection by having a secret backstory that only the pair of them shared — the idea that Peter had killed his father before the film opens. “It was just about having another level of connection that was unspoken. It gave us an extra layer,” she says.
Building a character
While those collaborative efforts helped, Dunst — a SAG nominee in the supporting actress category — also knew she had to bring Rose to life internally. “I had to create my own monster and my own insecurities.”
Dunst brought a unique physicality to Rose as well. “I could slump my shoulders to look like she’s going inward. I also changed my voice and wanted her to sound a little softer than I speak. And there were scenes where I didn’t speak for a while before we shot the scene so I would have that lump in the throat, almost like a fear of speaking.”
This modern woman also had to adjust to the way someone like Rose would have moved in the world. “I think the thing that makes her so old-fashioned is the way she doesn’t mention anything to her husband. She thinks, ‘Oh, let’s not make waves. Let’s get through it, maybe he’ll come around.’ I think she felt like she couldn’t speak up.”
Rose turns to alcohol to bury her emotions. So what was Dunst’s approach to the acting challenge of playing realistically drunk? “I watch drunk people on YouTube. There are a lot of them,” she says with a laugh. “Something else I did sometimes was a trick that Allison Janney taught me,” she adds, with reference to her co-star in 1999 indie comedy Drop Dead Gorgeous. “You spin around in a circle a bunch of times before you have to be wobbly in a scene.”
The shoot was interrupted by a pause due to the pandemic — Plemons and Dunst went back to California for more than a month and had to quarantine in a hotel for two weeks on their return to New Zealand (with a two-year-old and a two‑month-old, no less — she says one saving grace was having access to a hotel conference room where the toddler could play).
Since shooting The Power Of The Dog, Dunst has been happy to spend time with her children, giving Plemons space to film Killers Of The Flower Moon with Leonardo DiCaprio for Martin Scorsese. That time away from acting is about to come to an end — she is attached to a new project set to start shooting in the US this spring, but details remained under wraps at press time.
For Dunst, just completing The Power Of The Dog mid-pandemic was a blessing in itself: “To be able to work made me feel so much more grateful.” New Zealand, meanwhile, has made a lasting impact. “The beauty is just crazy. We had to drive an hour to the set from the house where we were staying — you pass a lot of sheep on the way to work.”
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