Kirsten Dunst Teases Role In The Entertainment System Is Down

Kirsten Dunst has given an intriguing tease of her role Ruben Östlund’s upcoming film The Entertainment System Is Down in which she is part of a large ensemble cast also featuring Daniel Brühl and Keanu Reeves among others.

“I felt like I bared a part of myself… it’s weird that it’s going to come out because of what I’ve shown and what I know that I’ve done,” Dunst said in an on stage conversation on the opening day of Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea Film Festival in Jeddah on Thursday.

“In the moment, you don’t think about it, but then you’re like, “Oh, yeah, people are going to watch me doing this’ wow,” continued the star, seen most recently in Roofman.

The satire, set on a long-haul flight between England and Australia where the entertainment system fails and passengers are forced to face the horror of being bored, is one of the most anticipated films of 2026, with expectations high that it will debut in Cannes .

Dunst’s comment was sparked by her recollection of working with Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier on 2011 drama Melancholia, which she said was the film she was most proud of to this day.

Her performance as a woman suffering from with debilitating depression ahead of the impending collision of a planet with Earth won her best actress at Cannes in 2011.

“A portrayal of depression is so difficult to show in cinema and I feel like what Lars did was really incredible. I felt so safe and it felt like we were doing this little play in Sweden that no one’s going to see and you don’t think about the audience,” she recalled.

The actress said she had had a similar experience working on Ostlund’s film, which shot on set in Hungary earlier this year.

She cast her mind back to the momentous Cannes premiere for Melancholia, in which Von Trier rendered himself persona non grata at the festival for a time when he declared he was a Nazi and understood Hitler.

“That was a memorable Cannes Film Festival, that probably goes down in the books as one of the craziest, but the festival was kind enough to allow our film to stay in competition. It was a very, very beautiful film,” she said.