CAMERA, KIRSTEN

After a two-year hiatus, the actress is back where she wants to be: the big screen.

- MICHELLE RUIZ

It’s 2 p.m. on a drizzly Thursday in Hollywood, and I am rug shopping with Kirsten Dunst. In the grand tradition of celebrity profile activities—yoga, pottery, picking at salads at iconic hotels—I meet the Oscar-nominated actress and millennial touchstone at Nickey Kehoe, the chic cottagecore interiors institution filled with splattered dishware, squirrel salt-and-pepper shakers, and vintage floral pillows.

This experience should be at least a little awkward, but Dunst, 41, makes it instantly, almost bizarrely, normal. After going in for the hug, she admits, with the intimacy of an old friend, that she’s kind of tired. I ask why, then start to answer my own question, at the same time she does: “Children.”

In the middle of the night, her 2-year-old son, James, burst into her bedroom, demanding that Dunst make space for him in bed. A fellow survivalist parent, Dunst lets James sleep with her while her husband, actor Jesse Plemons, is in New York. She enjoys the coziness; even his “stinky breath.” But then her aging beagle also woke her, needing to be let out. Dunst has a similarly relatable approach to the couple’s eldest son, 5-year-old Ennis: “Look, he’s eating three lollipops at once,” she later showcases the camera roll evidence. “He discovered Weird Mario on YouTube.”

We only just met beside an ocher velvet couch, but I get why Dunst suggested this luxuriously twee venue. When you have two kids under 6, an unencumbered rug-hunting jaunt counts as an indulgence. “I’m, like, a Volvo soccer mom right now,” she says of her current phase of life. “Selfishly, I was just like, I want to go shopping.”