Dunst Cheers Up

Kirsten Dunst is fed up with cheerleaders being portrayed as brainless eye candy. But the Golden Globe-nominated actress (Interview With the Vampire) hopes that her new film, Bring It On, in which she dons pom poms, will shatter that stereotype.

"This movie actually portrays cheerleaders as intelligent and not ditsy blondes," she tells TV Guide Online. "I'm so sick of seeing that cliché. Usually when you see cheerleaders they're getting killed in horror movies or something like that."

In Bring It On (opening Friday), Dunst plays the captain of a cheerleading team that makes it to the national ESPN competition. As a result, the former spirit leader had to brush up on her high kicks and back flips. "All the other girls got, like, three weeks of rehearsal, but I came late and only had one week," she notes. "I had to jam in all the stunts, all the dancing, everything into seven days. It was stressful, but it was so much fun. I love to dance and cheerleading is really like dancing."

Dunst broke into cheering in the eight grade as a way to fit in more with her classmates. "I was working on my films, and was sort of looked on as 'the actress,' " she explains. "I was always going off to do a film. It was like I was coming and going, and you feel like you're not really part of the school. So that's why I did the cheerleading thing. I wanted to be more popular and become part of the in crowd. But, by the time I got to high school, I had given [it] up."

And the local PTA probably breathed a sigh of relief. As Dunst recalls, she and her teammates invented an NC-17-rated cheer that led the locals to be aggressive, be, be aggressive. "We were the Hornets, and it went, 'Look... look... at... at... our Horny guys... our Horny guys... woo woo!' The parents got a load of this and we couldn't do that cheer anywhere. It was banned because they thought it was so provocative with our little moves and everything. I thought it was so funny."