Kirsten Dunst on how Allison Janney taught her to play a convincing drunk

In Netflix’s new awards contender, The Power Of The Dog, Kirsten Dunst plays Rose Gordon, a woman so terrorized by Benedict Cumberbatch’s asshole cowboy that she turns to the bottle. As Dunst told us in the video interview below, though, the actual way she learned to play drunk is pretty surprising.

Dunst says she learned her technique from Allison Janney on Drop Dead Gorgeous, saying the actress, “taught me this trick of spinning around in a circle a bunch to feel out of it. It also really works well for feeling like you’re stumbling naturally and because you’re dizzy and it really helps if you close your eyes while doing it.” Dunst says she recalls, “spinning around a bunch by the camera whenever Rose had to stumble out of the house or fall,” saying it’s a technique she uses “to make myself feel out of balance.”

Dunst’s beau in the movie, George Burbank, is played by her real life partner, Jesse Plemons. Since The Power Of The Dog was filmed in New Zealand both before and during the pandemic, we wondered if part of the pair’s attraction to the roles was getting to stay together as a family.

According to Plemons, “It’s definitely an added bonus,” continuing:

“There wasn’t much about this that wasn’t exciting. The script was one of the best scripts I’ve read in I don’t know how long. Obviously, getting to work with Jane [Campion] was a crazy exciting opportunity, and, I mean, I had so much fun working with Kirsten on Fargo. It was so natural and easy, and we had each other’s back pretty immediately and really trusted each other and could throw out ideas without ego or our getting our feelings hurt. So it was definitely really exciting to do that again in these different roles with Jane and in this world.”

The Power Of The Dog is in select theaters now, and will hit Netflix later this week. If you’re interested in hearing more about the film, you can check out our review, or watch our interview with star Benedict Cumberbatch.