Show Her The Money

Kirsten Dunst schemes her way into our hearts as striving single mom Krystal stubbs on Showtime's On Becoming a God in Central Florida.

- By David Hochman

KIRSTEN DUNST SOUNDS REMARKABLY UPBEAT FOR A woman whose day job revolves around a multibillion-dollar pyramid scheme. “It’s freeing for me to awaken some of those darker elements within,” she says, and clearly it’s working.

Dunst’s new SHOWTIME dark comedy, On Becoming a God in Central Florida, is heading into Season 2 with the sort of wild-eyed devotion you’d find among recruits of the show’s cultlike Founders American Merchandise company.

Set in the acid-wash ’90s on the scrappier side of Orlando, the series centers on waterpark employee Krystal Stubbs, a single mom out for revenge on a get-rich-never racket that brought her family to ruin. FAM bills itself as a ticket to the American Dream but consumes its desperate sales drones, sometimes literally. (Krystal’s brainwashed husband—played by Alexander Skarsgård—gets chomped by an alligator in the pilot episode; that’s not really a spoiler.) Now Krystal is working her way “upline,” in FAM-speak, to out scam the scammers from the inside and provide for her daughter, Destinee, at any cost.