Kirsten Dunst clarifies she's just 'really picky' about the roles she takes after saying she only got offered 'sad mom' parts for a while

• Kirsten Dunst told Business Insider she's "really picky" about the offers she accepts.
• Dunst recently said she didn't work for two years because she was only getting "sad mom" roles.

Kirsten Dunst has been a working actor for decades. And at this point in her career, she knows exactly the types of roles she does — and doesn't — want to take.

Dunst recently opened up about her break from acting in a Marie Claire cover story. According to Dunst, who's next starring in the upcoming Alex Garland film "Civil War," she didn't work for a time because she wasn't interested in the roles she was being offered.

"I haven't worked in two years," Dunst told the magazine of the gap in her filmography. She added that after playing a rancher's wife in the 2021 film "The Power of the Dog," which earned her an Oscar nomination, "every role I was being offered was the sad mom."

On the red carpet for the premiere of "Civil War" at the SXSW Film & TV Festival in Austin earlier this month, when asked about the influx of "sad mom" parts she'd passed on, Dunst told Business Insider that she couldn't recall specific offers that she'd characterized that way.

"For me, I'm actually just really picky," Dunst said, turning the conversation back to the types of roles she does enjoy — like her "Civil War" character, hardened war photographer Lee Smith.

"The idea of playing a photojournalist to me was way more exciting than anything else," she added.

Dunst carefully choosing her roles is nothing new. She's worked consistently since making her feature film debut as a child actor in the late 1980s but has resisted being pigeonholed into one genre. In the same Marie Claire interview, she reflected on how she avoided becoming a "movie-star-movie-star" after the blockbuster success of Sam Raimi's Spider-Man trilogy, in which she starred opposite Tobey Maguire, in the early 2000s.

"I didn't go do a bunch of romantic comedies," Dunst said. Instead, she opted to lean into indies in the aftermath of the superhero films — like Lars von Trier's 2011 drama "Melancholia," which earned Dunst the Best Actress award at Cannes that year.

"Civil War" is in theaters April 12.