Kirsten Dunst said she was belittled on the 'Spider-Man' set but 'just took it' because actors didn't speak out before #MeToo

• Kirsten Dunst said she was often called a 'girly girl' while filming the 'Spider-Man' trilogy.
• Dunst told Marie Claire that she felt uncomfortable but didn't have the confidence to speak out.

Kirsten Dunst said she was constantly belittled while filming the 2000s "Spider-Man" trilogy, but felt she couldn't speak out.

Dunst played Mary Jane Watson in the Sam Raimi-directed "Spider-Man" movies.

She told Marie Claire in a recent interview that it became a running joke on the set to call her "girly-girl," which made her uncomfortable.

"They would call me 'girly-girl' sometimes on the walkie-talkie. 'We need girly-girl,'" she recalled. "But I never said anything. Like, don't call me that."

Dunst said she didn't speak out before because she was still struggling to find her self-worth, and it was hard for actors to speak up before the #MeToo movement in 2018.

"You didn't say anything. You just took it," she said.

Later in the article, Dunst said started working with female filmmakers early in her career helped build her self-confidence.

Dunst said that with male directors "I feel like I get hired because I'm someone that they might want to sleep with."

"I think that's probably why I migrated to so many female directors at a younger age because I didn't want to feel that way," she continued.

Dunst has previously spoken about negative experiences filming the "Spider-Man" movies.

In 2021, Dunst told The Independent that a producer took her to a dentist's office to get her teeth altered before they started filming the first film. She was 19 at the time.

"I was like, 'Mmmmm, no, I like my teeth," Dunst said.

She said she liked her crooked teeth after being cast as an attractive character in Sofia Coppola's "The Virgin Suicides" in 1999.

In another interview with The Independent, Dunst said there was a "very extreme" pay gap between her and her costar, Tobey Maguire, who played Spider-Man in the trilogy.

"I didn't even think about it," she said. "I was just like, 'Oh yeah, Tobey is playing Spider-Man.' But you know who was on the cover of the second Spider-Man poster? Spider-Man and ME."

Dunst never specified how much she was paid, but Variety reported Maguire received $4 million for the first film and $17 million for "Spider-Man 2."

Despite that, Dunst told Marie Claire that she would still be willing to star in another superhero movie.

"Because you get paid a lot of money, and I have two children, and I support my mother," she said.