As comedians and Mel Gibson will tell you, there's nothing funny about the Nazis. Watching award-winning actresses react to hearing their director declaring himself a Nazi sympathizer, on the other hand, are a different story.
Such was the case when Melancholia star Kirsten Dunst watched in horror as the film's Danish director, Lars von Trier, "joked" at a post-screening press conference in Cannes that he was a Nazi and "understood Hitler." The reaction shot of Dunst’s choked, disapproving glare became internet fodder soon after.
"Well yeah, you could see my face. I was choking, because I'm watching a friend having a meltdown," Dunst told The Guardian in an interview published Tuesday. "And what he's saying is horrendous in a roomful of press. He was asked an inappropriate question [about his family] and his response was to make a joke about it. But no one laughed and he just kept unravelling."
The Spider-Man star goes on to say that she was shocked when her co-stars sat idly by while their helpless director was bombing on stage. "That's what I don't understand," she said. "There were a lot of us sitting there. There was Stellan [Skarsgård], John [Hurt], Charlotte [Gainsbourg]. And no one said something. No one wanted to help. I was the only one to lean in to Lars and get him to stop."
Furthermore, Dunst argues that, for her kindness, she was persecuted by the media; picked on because she was different. "Of course, I'm the one person that people would love to rope into that situation. They'd love to mess with me. So then I become the story. It becomes, 'Oooh, look at Kirsten's reaction!'"
And the 29 year-old wasn't done there. Not only does she claim she was persecuted because she's a Hollywood (yellow?) star, but she says the monsters in the media are so prejudiced against her they would never accept her in a more challenging role – say the part of a genitalia-mutilating character [like Gainsbourg's role in Von Trier's previous film, Antichrist], simply because she has big boobs.
"That kind of film is harder for someone like me to get away with. I'm more in the public eye than Charlotte," the British paper the reports her saying. "It's something about Charlotte's body, too. You couldn't have someone like me, with big breasts, in that film. Charlotte's thin and her breasts are small and that's easier to watch somehow. For someone like me to do that film -- it would almost be ridiculously shocking."