Kirsten Dunst is getting candid about being typecast in Hollywood due to ageism.
In a cover story for Marie Claire published on Tuesday, the 41-year-old Kirsten revealed that she took two years off from acting after starring in 2021′s The Power Of The Dog, because the only offers she received after were for “sad mum” roles.
“I haven’t worked in two years,” she said. “Every role I was being offered was the sad mom.”
Kirsten, who is returning to the big screen in A24′s forthcoming Civil War film, opened up about struggling with the two-year hiatus.
“To be honest, that’s been hard for me … because I need to feed myself,” she said. “The hardest thing is being a mum and … not feeling like I have nothing for myself. That’s every mother — not just me.”
“There’s definitely less good roles for women my age,” she added.
Elsewhere in the interview, Kirsten recalled feeling uncomfortable while filming the Sam Raimi-directed Spider-Man movies but not feeling supported enough to speak up.
Sharing that she didn’t like the way everyone on set called her “girly-girl,” she said: “You didn’t say anything. You just took it.”
Kirsten isn’t the only one to talk about the challenges she’s faced in acting as she’s gotten older. In 2021, Carrie-Anne Moss spoke about the pressure she faces as an older actor and revealed she was offered a grandmother role “literally the day after my 40th birthday”.
“I was reading a script that had come to me and I was talking to my manager about it,” Carrie-Anne said in a conversation with writer and filmmaker Justine Bateman at the time.
“She was like, ‘Oh, no, no, no, it’s not that role [you’re reading for], it’s the grandmother.’ I may be exaggerating a bit, but it happened overnight. I went from being a girl to the mother to beyond the mother.”