The five songs Kirsten Dunst couldn’t live without

Movie Songs

The five songs Kirsten Dunst couldn’t live without

Rotham September 29, 2025 0 Comments

(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)

Mon 29 September 2025 5:00, UK

It’s fair to say Kirsten Dunst is better known for her movie work, like kissing an upside-down Tobey Maguire or bouncing around as a cheerleader in Bring it On, than she is for anything overtly musical, but she’s done more than you might imagine.

Aside from a dalliance with Johnny Borrell of Razorlight back in the day, Dunst has also done plenty of singing of her own, including contributing a song to the soundtrack of a little-remembered 2001 comedy called Get Over It and repeating the trick a year later for the OST of a film named The Cat’s Meow (no, neither have we).

But she’s done music ‘proper’ too; it must be added. She contributed vocals to two tracks on fellow actor and Wes Anderson favourite Jason Schwartzman’s album Nighttiming back in 2007, but has stopped short of releasing her own stuff to avoid coming across too much like Barbra Streisand.

Dunst has also been seen in several major music videos over the years, including promos for the likes of Savage Garden, REM, The Beastie Boys, and notably chilled French duo Air, who composed the score to Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides which featured a fine turn by Dunst in a movie that’s gone on to be regarded as something of an end of century classic.

It was in the following couple of years that Dunst really saw huge fame thanks to her work on the billion-dollar-grossing Spider-Man movies and in the astonishing Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind in 2004. But over the next ten years and beyond, she began to take on more esoteric, independent movies like All Good Things with Ryan Gosling and then Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, which brought rave reviews for her performance.

Since then, she has worked on TV shows, including the drama On Becoming a God in Central Florida, which earned her a Golden Globe nomination, and then she found massive acclaim thanks to the inexplicably popular Jane Campion movie The Power of the Dog. She was also very, very good in the 2024 Alex Garland dystopian thriller Civil War.

But what tunes does Dunst spin when she’s having her downtime? Well, according to her chat with US radio station KCRW, it’s a varied mix of rock and folk with a bit of late-seventies art pop thrown in. Revealing her five favourite songs, Dunst led with the Bob Dylan classic ‘Girl from the North Country’, albeit recorded by two very different artists.

She said: “I chose ‘North Country Girl’, but it’s the version Johnny Cash does with Joni Mitchell. The first time I’d heard it was not that long ago, actually. I was on a road trip across the United States, and I was in Mississippi. My girlfriends had it on a playlist of theirs, and it just made me cry… It’s just beautiful. His deep voice and her sweet songbird voice. The marriage is beautiful and I can’t believe it’s live too, it’s so perfect.”

Elsewhere, Dunst picked out ‘She Smiled Sweetly’ by The Rolling Stones, from the 1967 album Between the Buttons – “I’m a Mick Jagger girl” – and Guns N’ Roses’ overblown epic ‘November Rain’ from 1991.

The actor also talked of her love of The Zombies’ ‘This Will Be Our Year’ from 1968, saying: “It’s The Zombies, I just love them. It’s one of those albums I’d listen to over and over again, and this song always just stuck out to me. It’s a classic.”

And finally, she went with 1978’s ‘Wuthering Heights’ by Kate Bush, the glorious debut single from the British singer that made her the first ever female to make number one with a self-penned song, at the insane age of 19.

Dunst concluded: “I love this other worldly quality. Her interpretive dance, she’s so wild and fantastical! I mean there is not anyone really like her, you know?”