Kirsten Dunst, best known for her role as Mary Jane Watson in the Spider-Man movies, describes herself as "lucky" to have begun her career at a young age.
Her comments come in light of the discussion of the # MeToo movement in Hollywood at Saudi Arabia's Red Sea Film Festival.
“I was lucky. I had a good family, a good mother. My mother was always around. Like, I never had anything, you know, negative happen to me like that. I was very protected," she says.
Given an example, Kirsten says when she was starring in Interview With the Vampire at the age of 11, Tom Cruise, her co-star, treated her graciously.
“I remember everyone treating me like a little princess, that’s for sure. Like I remember it was Christmas time and Tom Cruise put a gorgeous Christmas tree in my dressing room.”
Further, the actress heaped praise on Sofia Coppola, her fellow actor in Marie Antoinette. "It was really impactful, as a woman at 16, for me, because in an industry that wants you to change how you look, or, you know, focuses a lot on vanity, she really just loved my weird teeth, you know, things that other people wanted to change about me."
She continues, “She thought I was beautiful, and at 16, to have someone you look up to so much think that of you really gave me, like, such a huge, huge confidence. You know, I didn’t have an older sister, so that gave me a very big confidence."
"It’s not like I was overly confident, but it was like a quiet knowledge that I had inside me, that sustained me while I was growing up in this industry," Kirsten concludes.