We all know by now that it's no longer slumming for a movie star to appear on television. It was once—but thanks to shows like Breaking Bad, Mad Men,and Louie, TV has rocketed in prestige as of late, and these days it's not at all surprising to see major movie stars like Jack Black, Tim Robbins, or Zach Galifianakis taking their talents to the small screen.

Even in this television golden age, however, there's still something special about Kirsten Dunst's Golden Globe-nominated performance as Peggy Blumquist, an unassuming beautician at the epicenter of an ugly war between crime families, in FX's hypnotic take on Fargo. And with a cast that includes Patrick Wilson, Ted Danson, Nick Offerman, Brad Garrett, a revelatory Bokeem Woodbine (seriously, who knew?), Bruce Campbell, and Adam Arkin, the show isn't exactly lacking for big names.

Fargo is a television show in love with words. It tries to one-up the Coen Brothers (who are credited as executive producers) in giving actors the kind of monologues and dialogue they'll want to tattoo on their torsos and have emblazoned on their tombstones, so overjoyed are they by the verbiage and opportunities created for them. But the show is seldom more powerful or more compelling than when it slows down, cranks down the volume, and allows the camera to linger on the enigma that is Dunst's face. For all its exquisitely wrought words, a dialogue-free shot of Dunst on a bus, her face at once conveying everything and nothing as she contemplates the treacherous crossroads she finds herself at, is as good as Fargo gets.

The role of Peggy plays to the actress's gift for combining deceptive strength and guile with underlying vulnerability; it's a performance haunted by ghosts and informed by the Dunst's own career history, from the Midwestern beauty queen she played in Drop Dead Gorgeous (reviving her pitch-perfect Minnesota accent, at the very least) to her gloriously lived-in performance as Marion Davies in The Cat's Meow, another exploration of a fundamentally good woman involved in a complicated cover-up. It allows Dunst to once again play a woman who puts on a pretty, serene face to the outside world yet is falling apart on the inside, a victim of both her own mistakes and a society that simultaneously worships and torments beautiful women.

Since exploding into the public consciousness as a bloodthirsty child vampire in her Golden Globe-nominated turn in 1994's Interview With the Vampire, Dunst has been the all-American, achingly wholesome comic-book girl next door in Sam Raimi's three Spider-Man blockbusters and proven herself a fearless and adept physical comedienne in Bring It On, Dick, Drop Dead Gorgeous,and Bachelorette. Dunst has the fizzy ebullience to play the ultimate perky California cheerleader (Bring It On) and the quintessential Manic Pixie Dream Girl. (Indeed, I coined the phrase to describe her character in Elizabethtown to describe her irrepressible, life-loving stewardess, and Kirsten Dunst, if you're reading this, I'm so very sorry for doing so.) Indeed, the very quality that made Dunst's performance in Elizabethtown so iconically irritating—a sense of complete and total emotional investment, with no distancing, self-protecting irony—is also precisely what makes her such a vibrant, lively, surprisingly versatile actress; it's part of why she also has the dramatic heft and substance to anchor Melancholia, a movie that was famously heavy, dark, and depressing—even for a Lars Von Trier movie.

Dunst is the emotional core of Fargo, and for all its painterly tableaus, it never comes up with an image more magnetic or compulsively watchable as Dunst's resting face.

There's something inherently tragic about former child stars, something poignant about the inevitable loss of the beauty and youth that initially wins them public fame. Some former child stars allow that inveterate sadness to define their lives as well as their careers, becoming echoes of a long-lost past rather than vibrant performers who work in the present tense But Dunst has used her own child-star past to add another level of depth to her performances (Sofia Coppola has brilliantly employed Dunst as her vehicle to express provocative ideas about the tragedy of beauty and ephemeral wonder of youth, for example, in The Virgin Suicides and Marie Antoinette), and this is particularly true of Fargo's Peggy_._ With just the right tone of weary resignation, she delivers a spellbinding monologue on how her husband's pathological connection to his upbringing has transformed their home into a sad, sour little museum of the past. Her character has reconciled herself to living a small life in a small Midwestern town with a small husband with small ambitions, but after life throws them a tragic curveball, even the modest little life she's accepted as her destiny seems almost impossible to hold onto. Dunst is the emotional core of Fargo, and for all its painterly tableaus, it never comes up with an image more magnetic or compulsively watchable as Dunst's resting face.

Dunst has quietly racked up such an impressive career that it's likely some of her fans don't even realize how young she was when she started, Even before Interview With the Vampire introduced her to the public in a big way, she'd already scored roles in movies from Brian De Palma (Bonfire of the Vanities) and Woody Allen (New York Stories). But it's Dunst's performance in Fargo, a wildly cinematic, newfangled television show quasi-adapted from a famous movie, that paradoxically illustrates what a true, old-school movie star she really is.