‘Everyone’ Messes Up Kirsten Dunst’s Name, So How Are You Really Supposed To Pronounce It?

Kirsten Dunst stands perplexed in front of a microphone in Spider-Man 3.
(Image credit: Sony Pictures Entertainment/Marvel)

Kirsten Dunst has been a very famous and respected actress since she was a wee child of 11 who starred in Interview with the Vampire with Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise. She’s starred in movies like The Virgin Suicides, Civil War, Hidden Figures, Bring It On, and The Power of the Dog (which netted her an Oscar nomination), and TV series like Fargo. So, one would reasonably think that her many fans and the innumerable number of people she’s worked with and been interviewed by over the decades would pronounce her name correctly, right? Well, apparently not! But, she’s just given us the lesson we’ve needed.

What Did Kirsten Dunst Say About People Pronouncing Her Name Wrong And What’s The Right Way To Say It?

A Minecraft Movie sequel’s hopeful star Kirsten Dunst has begun making the rounds to promote her 2025 movie schedule release, Roofman (also starring Channing Tatum), which means that lots of people will be saying her name in the coming weeks. Unfortunately, during a recent chat with Town & Country, the Spider-Man franchise lead has now revealed that many people have been saying her name wrong for the entire time she’s been famous. As she said:

I mean, everyone messes up my name, so I give up. I don’t care. I’ll answer Kris-sten, Kur-sten, Keer-sten…I don't blame people. Like in England, they don't really say my name right. It's Keer-sten, yeah. But, again, who cares?⁠ [smiling] It’s fine.

I need to be honest here, folks. Not to brag, but I’ve totally been saying her name correctly this whole time. Yay me, right? While I will celebrate my intelligence with more caffeine in a bit, I do understand that sometimes people just can’t quite get others’ names right. I’ve had my name (Adrienne, pronounced A-dree-in) said in some truly wild ways over the years, so I do get it…but I also correct folks. Though, I will admit that if as many people said my name as the ones who’ve said Dunst’s name, I likely would have given up on that correction, as well.

This is hardly the first time we’ve heard that a celeb has spent years dealing with their name being messed up. There’s a whole list of famous folks whose names have been said wrong on the regular, like Rihanna and Zendaya, but others aren’t quite so obvious. This includes former James Bond actor Daniel Craig, who went viral not long ago for correcting the host’s pronunciation while appearing on a late night talk show.

Other long-established stars like Sister, Sister leads Tia and Tamera Mowry, Jake Gyllenhaal (who funnily talked out the pronunciation of his surname with Conan O’Brien), and Denzel Washington have admitted that we’ve all been getting their names WRONG forever. What are you gonna do? If you’re like Dunst and a lot of these other stars…man, you just let it go.

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Adrienne Jones
Senior Content Creator

Covering The Witcher, Outlander, Virgin River, Sweet Magnolias and a slew of other streaming shows, Adrienne Jones is a Senior Content Producer at CinemaBlend, and started in the fall of 2015. In addition to writing and editing stories on a variety of different topics, she also spends her work days trying to find new ways to write about the many romantic entanglements that fictional characters find themselves in on TV shows. She graduated from Mizzou with a degree in Photojournalism. 

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