Kirsten Dunst is without question an experienced actress. She’s been acting since childhood but the 37-year-old found herself in ‘a totally new world’ when she began filming Showtime’s new comedy series, On Becoming a God in Central Florida, in which she plays wife and mother, Krystal Stubbs, who gets involved in a pyramid scheme that nearly destroys herself and her family in 1992.
Dunst not only stars in the series alongside Big Little Lies actor Alexander Skarsgård but she’s an executive producer too.
During the 2019 TCA Summer press tour — there’s already talk of Dunst receiving an Emmy nomination for her role, according to PopSugar — Dunst discussed how she felt about the series when she first read the script and how challenging it proved to be to get the show made.
“I have to say, this material was just so special to me,” she told the audience. “It’s been three years now, and we’ve really had a little bit of a roller coaster of how this show actually got made to now being at Showtime,” Dunst added.
She also revealed there were more than a few times she doubted the show would even happen. “We worked hard. There were so many times where I was like ‘I don’t know if I can do this.’ … So it was a lot of hard work, but I knew reading that first episode, I was like ‘This is one of the best things I’ve read,’” she said.
Dunst also said that as a new mom, she is very concerned about Krystal’s baby daughter because she didn’t want that to be something the show simply forgot about, which sometimes happens on TV shows. She also didn’t want to miss the opportunity for comedy that a baby can provide.
As a new mother, Dunst brought a fresh perspective to the show. She and her fiancé, Jesse Plemons (Friday Night Lights), whom she met on the set of Fargo, welcomed a son, Ennis Howard Plemon, in 2018. During the event, Dunst said including Stubbs’s daughter in scenes was important to her because the child provided an element of comedy plus it needed to be more realistic compared to shows that simply forget about babies in scenes and leave viewers wondering where the child is at that particular moment.
“Every episode we would get, I’d be like, ‘We gotta have that baby in there. We gotta have that baby in there,’” Dunst said. “I always thought about Raising Arizona and how well they used the baby because you should use it for comedy. Like, we have this baby, but then, you know, there’s that other side to it that you’re worried about time . . . it’s such a big part of Krystal, obviously.”
She continued, “And for me having a baby, I had a whole other perspective of babies on set and how to interact and all that stuff. It was a totally new world for me, but also I felt more comfortable.”
Talking about going back to work after having a baby she said, “It’s so much easier to go back to work than it is to be a stay-at-home mom. I was like, ‘bye’ to my mother-in-law [who watches her son while she’s at work]! I was like, [phew!],” she told the audience.
Mandi Kerr, Showbiz CheatSheet
