Kirsten Dunst's iconic Spider-Man kiss was "miserable actually"

Maybe don't try kissing your super-powered boyfriend upside down in the rain at home

By Emma Keates | March 29, 2024 | 4:24pm

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Kirsten Dunst's iconic Spider-Man kiss was

Kirsten Dunst and Tobey Maguire in Spider-Man Screenshot: Sony Pictures/YouTube

We’ve gotten two new live-action Spider-Men (and an infinite amount of animated ones in the Spider-Verse) since Tobey Maguire took off the suit for what everyone thought would be the last time in 2007, but the actor’s upside-down kiss with Kirsten Dunst remains on the Mount Rushmore of Spidey moments in every universe. Its contributions to the general canon are hard to understate; writing for The A.V. Club in 2018, Tom Breihan opined that this single scene from Sam Raimi’s 2002 film “moved the superhero movie further out of nerdery than it had been since Tim Burton’s first Batman.” That’s a huge job well done for Maguire and Dunst, even if it sounds like they were only thinking of their own literal survival in the moment.

“I remember Sam Raimi giving me a book of famous kisses to be inspired but also he really wanted to make it special even though it was kind of miserable actually doing it,” Dunst recalled on ITV’s The Jonathan Ross Show (via The Independent). “It was pouring with rain, freezing, Tobey couldn’t breathe so it was almost like I was resuscitating him.”

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Maguire has previously spoken out about his side of the experience, and… um… it really does sound like he was literally waterboarded. “There was rain pouring down my nose… and then Kirsten pulls the mask up to [my nose] and it’s blocking the air passage there, so I couldn’t breathe. And then she’s kissing me, blocking the air passage there, so there’s nowhere else to breathe,” he said (via The Hollywood Reporter). “It was really challenging. They’d yell cut, and I would be [gasping for air], totally out of breath. It was torture. It makes you realize how important oxygen is.”

Dunst stars alongside her husband, Jesse Plemons, in her latest project, director Alex Garland’s Civil War. While she doesn’t have to kiss him in any horrifying ways in this particular film (their characters are on definitively opposite ends of the political spectrum), it sounds like the filming experience overall was just as challenging. “There’s so much gunfire, and then you look at the news and it’s a school shooting again,” she told Entertainment Weekly, revealing that she “had PTSD for a good two weeks after.” “I remember coming home and eating lunch and I felt really empty,” she continued. Someone, please give our girl a break!

Civil War premieres in theaters April 12.