I was in high school when the first Tobey Maguire Spider-Man movie came out. At the time, I was already a big fan of Kirsten Dunst. Up until that point, however, my brain had always read her name as “Kris-ten” not “Keer-sten.” I distinctly remember the moment I heard a TV reporter call her by her name out loud. It prompted a moment of epiphany. I felt badly for never reading it properly, but I’ve said it the “right” way ever since.
Kirsten is now decades into being famous, and people are still mispronouncing her name. At this point, she has made peace with this fact and decided that people calling her the wrong name does not bother her at all. During a recent interview, she was asked about how she handles correcting someone when they mispronounce her name. Keer-sten laughed and reiterated the correct way to say her name, then stressed how much she no longer cares if you say it the right way or not.
Kirsten Dunst is well aware of the power of a name. But even still, the Bring It On star isn’t bothered when people mispronounce hers—something they’ve apparently been doing for years.
“I mean, everyone messes up my name, so I give up,” Kirsten shared with Town & Country in an Aug. 20 TikTok. “I don’t care.”
The 43-year-old confessed that she’ll answer to anything from criss-ten to ker-stin to keer-sten—with the latter being how she actually pronounces it.
“I don’t blame people,” she explained. “Like in England, they don’t really say my name right.”
But it’s not just those in the United Kingdom who have issues with the pronunciation.
“The last set, everyone was saying my name wrong,” the Power of the Dog star recalled. “There was like Swedish people and people from Hungary. You just give up.”
But she clarified the one and only way to correctly say her name is “Keer-sten.”
“But again, who cares?” she quipped. “It’s fine.”
Poor Kirsten! I feel badly that she’s accepted the fact that there will always be people who pronounce her first name wrong. I know this is not an uncommon situation, but I just figured that after 30+ years, the correct way to say it would be common knowledge. (Accents aside, of course.) She’s so funny and gracious about it, though. Her comments got me thinking about other commonly mispronounced celebrity names. Off the top of my head, we’ve got Alicia Silverstone, who pronounces her name as “Ali-See-yuh” and Ralph Fiennes, who pronounces his first name as “Rafe.” This next example is not the same thing, but I was stoked when I finally learned the correct, Irish pronunciation of Saorise Ronan’s name, which is “Ser-sha.” I don’t know how I’d feel if people kept mispronouncing my first name, but I imagine I’d also get to a point where as long as the checks cashed, I’d also just sigh and not care anymore.
Photos credit: Laurent Zabulon/Abaca Press/INSTARimages, Getty