[article id="1638512"]Kristen Stewart[/article] is getting some female companionship while heading out "On the Road." Variety reports that "Spider-Man" actress Kirsten Dunst will play an unspecified role in director Walter Salles and producer Francis Ford Coppola's adaptation of Jack Kerouac's 1957 novel.

Dunst joins a growing cast that already includes Stewart, Garrett Hedlund ("Tron: Legacy") and Sam Riley ("Control").

"On the Road" tells the story of Salvatore "Sal" Paradise (Riley), a curious man who embarks on a road trip across the country. He meets an eclectic assortment of characters along the way, including the self-assured-but-trouble-attracting Dean Moriarty (Hedlund) and his wife Marylou (Stewart).

Dunst's involvement in "On the Road" comes just one week after the announcement of Stewart's own participation. "I am super excited about it," she told USA Today of her casting.

The road to bring "On the Road" to the big screen has been a lengthy one, as Coppola and Salles first secured the rights to the film more than three decades ago. The movie entered production in 2005 but stalled due to a lack of financing. In his attempts to adapt "On the Road," Salles traveled the same cross-country route as the book's author and even filmed a documentary, "In Search of On the Road."

"The film greatly benefited from the extra time we had to conceptualize it," Salles told Variety of his lengthy journey in adapting the novel. "The unedited scroll version was published recently and inspired a new version of the screenplay written by Jose Rivera that is at the same time more luminous, daring and muscular than the one we had at the start."

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