Which Jealous Actress Called Kirsten Dunst a Dumb Cheerleader
It's a cruel and unusual thing to say
The new Oscar nominee and better half of Hollywood’s most heterosexual power couple Kirsten Dunst recently revealed to The Hollywood Reporter that another actress once called her nothing but a “dumb cheerleader” for her perfect role in Bring It On, the 2000 movie that Roger Ebert once called “the Citizen Kane of cheerleading movies” with “genuinely talented cheerleaders.”
Who the eff said this about our Kiki, the most famous woman in the world? Some ideas:
Scarlett Johansson
My first thought was “Scarlett Johansson” and the commentariat of the web’s best gossip site (besides Just Jared Junior) Oh No They Didn’t agree. While she was only 16 when Bring It On came out, ONTD commenter beesknees7 points out, “I read this whole post and still think it's Scarlett. She probably would have been working on Ghost World & with the Coen brothers on The Man Who Wasn't There around that time so I can see that making her pretentious and catty.”
And teens are famously mean. Have you not seen Bring It On? Or Bring It On Again? Or Bring It On: All or Nothing?
Betty White
Turns out that the cast of Golden Girls hated Betty White’s ass, according to the LA Times podcast The Originals. Golden Girls casting director Joel Thurm said that White’s co-star called her “the C-word.”
“I mean, I heard that with my own ears,” Thurm said. “And by the way, so did Rue McClanahan. Rue McClanahan said it to me in Joe Allen’s [restaurant]; Bea Arthur [when she was] on the set of ‘Beggars and Choosers.’”
Calling America’s best blonde actress a “dumb cheerleader” sounds like c-word behavior to me.
Mena Suvari
Dunst turned down the role of Angela Hayes in American Beauty in order to do Bring It On because she didn’t want to kiss Kevin Spacey. The role went to Mena Suvari who, as an adult, detailed a gross experience with her co-star in which he cradled her in a bed off-screen as practice. She hailed it as a “such a genius move on his part.”
Dunst had, of course, had to kiss a 31-year-old Brat Pitt as an 11-year-old in Interview with a Vampire.
I could envision a world in which Suvari felt she was doing powerful adult art and gloating a little bit that her competitor for American Beauty had instead opted to set her sights on the Rancho Carne Toros varsity squad instead.
Reese Witherspoon
Remember when Reese Witherspoon was arrested for driving under the influence in 2013 and asked the cop, “Do you know my name?” An iconic move, surely, and also one that allows me a look into her psyche. She may have been on the brink of Legally Blonde in 2000 which is, to call back to Ebert’s parlance, the dumb cheerleader movie of legal dramas, but I could see her thinking it was a dark satire. She’s talked before about re-writing her entire character of Annette Hargrove in Cruel Intentions, likely affirming to herself that she’s no dumb cheerleader.
Julia Roberts
It was probably Julia Roberts. Julia Roberts from 1998 to 2002 is my second-favorite actress ever, but she doesn’t seem all that warm. Remember when she and Jen Aniston dunked on Chrissy Teigen for overdressing and then crashing a Zoom reading of Fast Times at Ridgemont High for charity? It was a subversive act of truth telling in a famously fake industry, but it was pretty mean. That’s probably all I need to know about her bullying Kiki.
