Kirsten Dunst isn't making any promises on her Civil War press tour

Over the past few months, we’ve gotten a whole 101 course on the wide range of different approaches to the hallowed Press Tour. On one hand, you have Reneé Rapp’s charming “no media training at all” Mean Girls tour, complete with cussing out misogynistic bus drivers and other such antics. Then you have Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell picking up the Jessica Chastain and Oscar Isaac mantle of looking like you really want to kiss on the red carpet, all while maintaining that you somehow actually haven’t. And of course, there’s the Dakota Johnson school of openly despising the movie you’re in whenever anyone asks. The point is, there are a lot of ways to promote a movie. But with Kirsten Dunst’s recent Civil War tour, we’re getting something we haven’t really seen in a while: measured but unapologetic. And it’s working.

Dunst has been around the block more than a few times now. Making her acting debut at age 6, she’s had her fair share of press setbacks—for example, that one time she had to contend with Melancholia director Lars von Trier telling a Cannes audience that the idea of being a Nazi “gave [him] some pleasure” and that he could “understand Hitler.” (Yes, that’s unfortunately real.) Over the years, she’s clearly learned how to step back and trust audiences to decide for themselves—especially concerning a movie as sure to be divisive as Alex Garland’s Civil War.

Of course, that doesn’t necessarily mean she thinks the movie is bad. Quite the opposite, actually. “This movie, after you see it, you want to talk about it for a while with people. And I think any movie that does that is incredible,” she told Variety in a recent profile.

The film will certainly get people talking. Dunst plays a journalist attempting to document a falling America, as a fascist White House encourages widespread armed violence across the nation. Remind you of anyone in particular? Dunst is letting audiences draw their own conclusions about that as well. “It feels fictitious to me,” she said of Nick Offerman’s presidential role. “I don’t want to compare because that’s the antithesis of the film. It’s just a fascist president. But I didn’t think about Nick’s character being any certain political figure. I just thought this is this president, in this world, who will not abide by the Constitution and democracy.”

Dunst also won’t tell audiences how they should feel after the remarkably intense film, but hasn’t hidden the fact that it sounds like it gave her some pretty intense anxiety. “I was just so shook. I didn’t know what to do with myself,” she told GQ about the experience of watching the film for the first time. “The movie feels very real. It feels like a warning or a fable about what happens when the wrong people are in power.” Separately, she told Marie Claire that filming some of the combat sequences “shook me to my core.” “[I] had PTSD for a good two weeks after. I remember coming home and eating lunch and I felt really empty,” she elaborated.

Does Dunst think the movie is objectively good? That’s not for her to determine. Audiences can decide for themselves when they experience it in theaters starting April 12. She did make one assertion regarding our current political climate to Marie Claire, however, that’s worth reproducing here. “[Trump] can’t win. I honestly feel like… we just need a fresh start. We need a woman,” she said. “All the countries that are led by women do so much better.” Amen, Kirsten.