Kirsten Dunst recalled that before cameras rolled on the 2002 Spider-Man movie, the producers took her to get her teeth fixed.
Dunst made her Mary Jane debut opposite Tobey Maguire in the title role in Sam Rami’s Spider-Man in 2002, followed by Spider-Man 2 in 2004, and Spider-Man 3 in 2007.
And despite landing such a huge role, Dunst recalled producers pushing then-19-year-old Dunst to get her teeth fixed.
She said they literally took her to the dentist's office, but she never went in.
"I was like, 'Mmmmm, no, I like my teeth,'" Dunst told Independent, looking back on the experience decades later.
Dunst said she had this confidence about her crooked teeth after working with Sofia Coppola on the 1999 movie The Virgin Suicides, in which the actress played one of five attractive sisters who have a troubled life.
"The fact that the coolest girl liked how I looked, that's what preserved me," Dunst said of Coppola.
"She made me feel pretty. As a 16-year-old girl, you feel like crap about yourself, right? So to have my first experience of a more 'sexy' role be through her eyes gave me confidence that helped me deal with a lot of other things."
Looking back, Dunst doesn't know if she would have kept the crooked teeth if it weren't for Coppola.
"Who knows? I mean, I have a really good mom, too, but my mom is someone who might have been like, 'Yeah, why not have straight teeth?'" Dunst said.
"I just remember her wanting to get a facelift or a boob job, those kinds of things. It never looked good. That kind of vanity... you've got to be really careful with that stuff."
Elsewhere in the interview, Dunst revealed that she was paid considerably less than Magure for the Spider-Man trilogy.
"The pay disparity between me and Spider-Man was very extreme," she said. "I didn't even think about it. I was just like, 'Oh yeah, Tobey [Maguire] is playing Spider-Man.'"
"But you know who was on the cover of the second Spider-Man poster?" she continued. "Spider-Man and ME."
The specific amount the Fargo actress made for her work in the Spider-Man franchise is unknown.
Tobey Maguire garnered $4 million starring as the titular superhero in the first film, then negotiated a salary of $17.5 million for the sequel, according to a 2007 article by Variety.
In 2017, Dunst talked to Variety about dealing with Hollywood's gender pay gap saying: "Because I was young, I thought, 'Oh wow, I'm getting paid a lot of money for the 'Spider-Man' movies.'"
"But definitely the men were getting paid more," she went on, adding: "So yes, I experienced that."