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‘Technically, I did my first film when I was two,” says Elle Fanning, which, at 26, makes her a youthful old-timer, already more than two decades into a hugely successful acting career. The cliché of the child star is that they will, inevitably, go off the rails at some point, unable to cope with a demanding adult-oriented entertainment business that places its leading lights on a distant and unreachable pedestal, leaving them with no concept of real life and no solid framework to prop them up. But there are other, less headline-worthy outcomes for performers who have been at it for their whole lives. Some child stars, particularly those who seem to be thriving, may be more like professional athletes, singular in their ambitions, trained and focused, more than content to remain within the industry that has raised them.
I suspect that Fanning leans towards the latter. She was born in Georgia in 1998 and was brought up in California, where her family moved when she was two, to pursue her older sister Dakota’s acting career. “My family is very southern, so it’s southern hospitality and southern manners,” she explains. “My grandmother would go with me on all my film sets, or my mom, to keep us in line. Thank God they were there with us.”
Anything I have seen of her, out of character, suggests an upbeat woman with a sunny disposition. Do people who have seen her growing up on screen expect her to be, well, sweet? “I guess that’s true,” she says, quite sweetly. “I also think, on a grander scale, that as a ‘child actor’, people see you as younger than you are.”
What changed all that was The Great, the bawdy period drama written by The Favourite’s Tony McNamara, in which Fanning plays Catherine the Great, huzzah-ing, shooting and shagging her way around the courts of 18th-century Russia. “It was cool when I did The Great, because I had done Maleficent, and that was such a sweet, Sleeping Beauty, Disney princess role. That was what people recognised me for, and then getting to be a princess, and raunchy, and turning it on its head, that was very fun to do.” But then again, she reminds me, she was 17 when she did The Neon Demon, a psychological horror which so repelled audiences at Cannes that it was roundly booed. “That was very polarising, and I loved shocking people. It was a shock to see me, because I turned pretty evil in that movie,” she says, with a smile. “But there is an excitement to that. I think it means that you’ve done something right, because at least you’re not hitting it right down the middle. The last thing I want to be is boring or average or expected.”
Fanning has been so prolific that any number of films could be considered her big breakthrough. She was 12 when she shot Super 8, JJ Abrams’s retro sci-fi drama. “People used to recognise me and say, ‘Oh, are you Dakota Fanning?’ Like, ‘No! That’s my sister.’ But when I did Super 8, they started to be like, ‘You’re Elle,’ and would recognise me for me.”
Fame and recognition are among the themes of the Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown, which Fanning is in London to promote, but in this film, celebrity is corrosive. In many ways, success makes Dylan’s world smaller, eventually destroying his relationship with Fanning’s character, Sylvie Russo, a lightly reimagined version of Dylan’s first girlfriend, Suze Rotolo.
Fanning has known her co-star Timothée Chalamet for years; they played a couple on the ill-fated 2019 Woody Allen film A Rainy Day in New York. Chalamet goes all-in on his role as Dylan, singing live and perfecting Dylan’s mannerisms and accent. Did he keep up the voice off-camera? “He didn’t do that with me,” she says. She refers to him as Timmy. “In some ways, [their relationship] emulates the structure of Sylvie and Bob, because I knew him before he became…” She gestures, widely, meaning before he became Timothée Chalamet, a movie star so hot-right-now he inspires lookalike contests.
At a screening of the film the night before, Fanning told the audience that when she was 13, she would write “Bob Dylan” on her hand in pen. “Every day, in middle school, in cursive,” she explains. The director Cameron Crowe introduced her to his music on the set of We Bought a Zoo. “I wasn’t allowed to have posters on my walls because I had flowery wallpaper and my mom didn’t want me to ruin it, but I had a corkboard and I would print out Bob Dylan photos and put them up on my corkboard.” This was not typical behaviour at her school, where her peers preferred the Jonas Brothers. “I didn’t have those people on my wall. I was obsessed with Marilyn Monroe, Bob Dylan. I loved vintage clothes. They were actually really cool but, you know, not the normal thing to fit in.”
Was she OK with not fitting in? “Yeah,” she says, more slowly. “I was OK. And then there was a time where I was like, OK, I’m gonna wear the skinny jeans and the T-shirt, and try to wear the sexy dress to the barmitzvah, or whatever. And then it was like, gosh, this just – it wasn’t quite me.” But, she adds, there are times when everybody does that, tries on another version of themselves for size. “And then inevitably, I’m like, all right, go back to yourself.”
In the past, Fanning has described herself as an old soul. She looks like one today, in a shirt with a collar so wide it practically reaches the 1970s. She is regularly cast out of time, in the 60s, or the 80s, or even earlier, strapped into corsets, as in The Great, Mary Shelley or The Beguiled. She once said she has “period face”. “I do! I do think so,” she says. In A Complete Unknown, she gets to play a painter, living in a tiny apartment in Greenwich Village in New York with her folk musician boyfriend. The film is set in the early 60s, so it isn’t quite the hippy era, but the times, they are a’changin’. “It’s kind of an in-between time, but there was so much possibility. It was beautiful to step into that time, where there’s no social media, no phones.”
The apartment they filmed in was built to the exact specification as Dylan and Rotolo’s real home. “There’s a lot of photos of them that [costume designer] Arianne Phillips had, of them lounging and just looking so sweet and young. Walking into the set that is literally the same was moving, because you’re like, wow, it’s these young people in this tiny apartment that was gritty, and had cigarette butts everywhere. And a 19-year-old Bob Dylan came to New York and was writing these songs in this room, which is mind-blowing. Just, what a genius he was and how much came out of that time, you know?”
In the modern age, in her real life, Fanning is, like many of her peers, on social media, despite her old-world leanings. “I try to keep it healthy. I only have Instagram, but I look at it a lot. I think the comparing culture of that can be a crazy rabbit hole to go down. The doom-scrolling, and everything.” She says she tries to ensure that it remains a “light place”. “But, of course, you inevitably can’t help but fall into the hole sometimes, of comparing yourself to others and all these filtered images.” Still, she doesn’t let it get to her as much as it once did and now she mostly uses it to watch videos, though the algorithm which selects them is currently confusing her. “It’s someone who rolls glasses down stairs, and there are marbles in there. It’s like, ‘Oh, is that one gonna break, or is that one gonna break? What is that?’” Is the algorithm revealing something she didn’t know about herself? “Oh, for sure. What does that say? I mean, seriously, I don’t know. I also get rug cleaners. These rugs that are filled with mud and it’s just someone power-washing them.” Do you like cleaning rugs? “No! I’ve never done it. But I like watching it, apparently.”
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Perhaps she will find some offbeat material for her production company, Lewellen Pictures, which she set up with Dakota, and which is named after an old family dog, from when the sisters were growing up. People might see an actor with a production company and think it’s a vanity project… “Totally,” she says. But one of their early projects was Mastermind, a docuseries about Dr Ann Burgess, a pioneer in the field of trauma and the effects of sexual violence, which is not exactly a fluffy indulgence. It’s Dakota who is the true-crime obsessive, says Fanning. But they do like to shine a spotlight on interesting people, and find stories that should be told. Such as? “I like anything that is tonally surprising. Most of the projects we’ve done and have in the pipeline are female stories, because that’s what we relate to the most. But I think the underbelly of the things that people are scared to talk about or scared to touch, or subjects that might be scary for people to adapt, that’s what interests me, a lot.”
Fanning was a producer on The Great, her first time working behind the scenes. She joined the show when she was 20, and was 25 when it finally ended. “So that’s a substantial part of your 20s,” she says. She credits the show with teaching her how to do comedy. “You have to be completely uninhibited and you have to embarrass yourself. And it was great, because the whole cast on that show was so brilliant that we were happy going to embarrass ourselves in front of each other. We were, like, ‘Let’s just throw it all out there.’”
She loved its sensibility, the precision of its language, its bawdy humour. In 2023, after three seasons, and to the shock of many, it was cancelled, despite being a critical success and a magnet for award nominations. Did she know the end was coming? “I think, ummm, no,” she says, carefully. “We knew that it was a possibility when we were filming season three, but we didn’t know for sure.” This meant that the cast and crew didn’t get to say a final goodbye to each other. “That’s what I was sad about. But actually, Tony wrote it in a way that I thought was brilliant, because with that final scene being the dance, it summed it up perfectly. I would have been sad if it was a cliffhanger.”
If The Great hadn’t been axed, she would have definitely gone back, but its cancellation meant she got to do A Complete Unknown and she is at the start of what sounds like a busy year ahead. She is producing and will star in an adaptation of the novel Margo’s Got Money Troubles, for Apple TV+, a “sweet” family dramedy about a woman who joins OnlyFans to make ends meet. She’s in the latest Predator film, which she describes as “crazy”. She has worked with the Danish-Norwegian director Joachim Trier on Sentimental Value, his first film after The Worst Person in the World. At least she’s not hitting it right down the middle. “I mean, that’s what I hope,” she says.
She has been doing this for a long time, after all. Fanning got her start in acting, when she was called on to play a younger version of her sister Dakota’s character in 2001’s I Am Sam. Was there any sense she could have done something else, had she wanted to? “I definitely could have, for sure. My mom wanted us to be tennis players, because she was a tennis player.” There’s that athletic streak. “We came from a whole athletic family, but my sister didn’t like it.” They tried putting Dakota in football classes, and violin classes, to get a sense of what she might want to do. “And then she went to a play camp in Georgia and Dakota was really good at the play. I mean, she was five years old, but she was like a savant five-year-old,” she says, fondly.
At home, the sisters would act out stories together, pretending they were in The Devil Wears Prada. “She would be Miranda Priestly and I would be the assistant,” says Fanning. When Dakota appeared in the medical drama ER, “They packed together this little kit for her to bring home, not real needles, but props from the set. So We were, like, ‘Oh, we’ve got those, so now we can play doctor,’ and I’d be a baby.”Or we’d pretend that we were drinking wine, but it was Coca-Cola When she looks back on home videos of herself, as a child, she can see that her own path was laid out from the beginning.
“I was a ham. I just wanted to be seen.” Now, she says, she feels she is exactly where she is supposed to be. “I can literally not imagine being anything else.”
A Complete Unknown is released in cinemas on 17 January
English (US) ·