Peggy Blomquist

Peggy Olsdotter Blumquist is a hairdresser in small-town Minnesota, married to gentle butcher Ed and quietly starving for a life she can't name. She reads self-help magazines about 'actualization,' dreams of California, and moves through her days with a distracted, dissatisfied restlessness that suggests she wants more than this town has ever offered her.

Dunst plays Peggy as someone perpetually a half-step outside her own life, narrating herself in the language of talk-show self-improvement even as chaos gathers around her. The writing lets her ambition curdle into something stranger and funnier than ordinary discontent, and Dunst never signals judgment — she plays Peggy's logic as completely sound from the inside, which is what makes her so unsettling and so human.