We’ve all been saying it wrong: Kirsten Dunst sets the record straight on her name

Kirsten Dunst isn’t the first celebrity whose name we’ve been mispronouncing all along without realizing, and she certainly won’t be the last: Zendaya (pronounced “zen-day-ah”), Dionne Warwick, Taylor Lautner, Saoirse Ronan, Jake Gyllenhaal… just a few of the stars whose names we get wrong.

‘Vampire’ actress Dunst joined the group a long time ago – so long ago that she no longer has the urge to correct anyone that might be phonetically out of order by calling her ‘KERsten’.

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How is Kirsten Dunst’s name pronounced?

“It’s KIER-sten, yeah, but again… who cares! (laughs). It’s fine,” she explained in an interview with Town & Country magazine this week. “Correcting someone on the pronunciation of your name… I mean, everyone messes up my name. So I give up, I don’t care. I’ll answer Kristen, Kersten, Kiersten – which is how you say my name, but I don’t blame people. In England, they don’t really say my name right – on the last set, everyone was saying my name wrong, but there was Swedish people and people from Hungary, so you just give up”.

With an equal dash of irony, the actress says hopes her career will take an upturn sometimes soon – not artistically, it would just be nice for a lucrative project to land in her lap. For example, perhaps a role in the sequel to Minecraft, which her sons Ennis and James loved, and which raked in a whopping $955 million at the box office.

“Maybe I can just make a movie where I don’t lose money?” she sighed. Not that she isn’t grateful for the success she has already achieved.

Sofia Coppola has used her extensively, handing her lead roles in Marie Antoinette (2006) and The Virgin Suicides (1999). And several other movies she appeared in were commercially successful, for example, The Spider-Man Trilogy (2002-2007), Bring It On (2000) and Jumanji (1995).

And more recently, her performance in Jane Campion’s psychological drama The Power of the Dog which earned her an Academy Award nomination.

Kirsten has just finished filming The Entertainment System Is Down, in Budapest with Keanu Reeves, Daniel Brühl and Samantha Morton. Swedish director Ruben Ostlund’s followup to Tri­angle of Sadness, a black comedy set on a long-distance flight hampered by a technological meltdown.

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