Despite being a well-known actress with dozens of credits, Kristen Dunst tells Variety that she still thinks of auditions as “the most stressful thing to me on the planet Earth.”
Most audiences first became familiar with Dunst after her appearance as the young vampire Claudia in 1994’s Interview with the Vampire, but Dunst confesses that she wouldn’t have gotten the role if it wasn’t for her acting coach making her re-do her audition. She recalls, “I was with my coach. He was outside of the room. He listened on the door to hear, like, what I was doing. And he knows I didn’t nail it. And I walked out, and he was like, ‘No, you go back in there.’ He’s like, ‘Apologize to the casting director.’ He’s like, ‘She didn’t do what she can do.'”
Dunst says that she still has anxiety when it comes to auditions, and the roles she doesn’t get still haunt her. In fact, the fact that she is a successful actress makes her feel even worse when she doesn’t get a role she auditioned for. She explains, “When I used to audition a lot I had little things I would do, like get up, turn around — like, have little things that people would remember you by. Now, it’s like I don’t have that trick bag and if I don’t get it, I’ll feel like an extra failure because I have a body of work.”
