Dakota Fanning has spent much of her career being asked to prove that she has grown up. The premier child actor of the aughts has been burdened with the same narrow, repetitive narrative since 2000: How would she finally make the transition from a precocious young star to an adult actor? “I think people get locked into a certain view of growing up as a child actor,” she says.
“I hope that maybe I’ve expanded someone’s view of what it can look like.”
Fanning is calling from an apartment in New York, her whiteboard busy with a schedule of the scenes she’s due to film for a project she can’t talk about yet. She is as giggly and gracious as she seems on late-night talk shows, often addressing me by name—though that may have as much to do with her upbringing in Georgia as her many years of practice talking to the press.
Following sharp turns in a succession of sleek streamer dramas—Ripley and The Perfect Couple on Netflix; All Her Fault for Peacock—Fanning’s latest performance, in The Sun Never Sets, mumblecore auteur Joe Swanberg’s first film in a decade, is perhaps as demonstrative of who she is at 32 as anything else she’s made recently. The indie casts Fanning as Wendy, an IPA-drinking construction worker in Alaska.
All of her friends are having babies
All of her friends are having babies and Wendy is desperate for one too, but she’s caught up in a love triangle with her shambolic ex, Chuck (Cory Michael Smith), and Jack (Jake Johnson), a father of two kids who doesn’t want anymore. “I can relate to all of that as somebody who really does want kids,” Fanning tells me. “I wouldn’t be in a relationship with somebody who doesn’t want them.”
Swanberg typically begins with a rough outline for his films rather than a traditional script.
“It’s a lot of improvisation and collaboration,” explains Fanning. “So you end up bringing a lot of yourself to it. We would just go on these tangents, talking about our own experiences, and then we made a movie out of them.” She was keen to make use of her experiences with dating in particular. “That’s obviously the world I inhabit as a single girl. You know, I do find myself getting cynical about dating, but what I love most about Wendy and the film is that it isn’t cynical.
It shows the reality of being a person trying to form relationships, and everyone’s doing their best.”
Fanning’s younger sister, Elle, recognized her in the role immediately. “When she watched the movie, she was like, ‘People are going to think that they’ve never seen you in a role like this, and I think that’s true,’” Fanning recalls. “But she also said, ‘What they might not know is that it’s so you.’” Wendy, she adds, “is the person my family and friends know me as.”
Fanning’s work in the film is beguilingly unflashy, leading with feeling in a way that also feels true to her own life—though she can’t say for sure where that quality comes from: “Like, am I someone who’s in touch with their emotions because in films that’s a part of what you have to do?
Or was I always in touch with my
Or was I always in touch with my emotions?”
Fanning has been acting since she was six, when the assumption was that she was too young to understand what she was doing. But to hear her tell it, if anything, her youth was an asset. “It’s almost unimaginable to some people that you could be young and pursue [this career] and be conscious of what you’re doing,” she says. “I wasn’t ever just playing a kid in a movie.
It wasn’t just showing up and saying a couple of lines.” (It’s not for nothing that at 12 she became the youngest-ever member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences—news that was broken to her by a story on Yahoo’s homepage.)
And besides, Fanning adds, “at the end of the day, acting is make-believe. I think being a child lends itself really well to acting.”
Now some 25 years into her career, Fanning has never seemed more capable.
Not only has she received some of her best reviews lately—Ripley and All Her Fault both earned her Emmy nominations—but she and Elle have begun producing things of their own. Among the projects they have developed through Lewellen Pictures, which the sisters formed in 2021, are Margo’s Got Money Troubles, Elle’s star vehicle for Apple TV, and next year’s The Nightingale, in which they will appear side by side for the first time.
The film—an adaptation of Kristin Hannah’s historical novel—is
The film—an adaptation of Kristin Hannah’s historical novel—is currently in postproduction and will be released next spring. It’s a collaboration that has been a long time coming. “I am blown away by who she is as an actor and the transformations she’s able to make. I’m her biggest fan,” Fanning says of Elle. With The Nightingale, she adds, “I finally got to see the magic up close.”
“It felt like we were little girls again in our playroom, making up scenarios and playing together,” Fanning continues.
“But we were so nervous. Like: Is it going to feel weird? Are we going to start laughing? Are we going to be able to take each other seriously? And then the first day, the first scene came, and it was the most natural thing in the world.”
Source: www.vogue.com
