COAT AND GLASSES COACH
This story appears in i-D issue 375, on newsstands now.
she admits, “I never check the weather” (it’s 80 degrees Fahrenheit, and she’s wrapped tightly in a trench coat); and three, she doesn’t actually live anywhere. Fanning’s schedule is so hectic, she crashes at the homes of loved ones everywhere she goes—with her boyfriend, Rolling Stone chairman Gus Wenner, when in New York, or with her family when she’s in LA. Her life is a succession of pit stops determined by whichever movie she’s working on. She barely knows what day of the week it is. All she knows for certain, she admits with a deep, twinkly-eyed grin: She’s loving the wild ride that is her life right now.
It’s still early dawn LA-time, so she should be seriously jet-lagged. Yet, even before her first sip of cappuccino, she’s vibrating with energy. In fact, she initially suggested we meet an hour earlier. She’s only in town for a short time and wants to soak up every minute.
Fanning is currently enjoying a breather in the midst of a nonstop year that is about to get even crazier. This year, fresh off the heels of her heart-wrenching performance in 2024’s Bob Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown, she stars in Sentimental Value, Joachim Trier’s comedy-drama about a showbiz family, starring Stellan Skarsgård. Later this autumn, her first-ever action film, Predator: Badlands will be released. She has also just wrapped Apple TV+’s Margo’s Got Money Troubles, which she produced and stars in, alongside Michelle Pfeiffer and Nicole Kidman. And, soon enough, she’ll begin filming another movie franchise, playing young Effie Trinket in The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping.
The affable demeanour so palpable in Fanning’s performances is amplified tenfold in person. She smiles easily, listens intently, and laughs without inhibition, squeezing her eyes shut tight and throwing her head back in an open-mouthed guffaw. Kirsten Dunst, her co-star in Sofia Coppola’s The Beguiled (2017), describes her as “the realest of the real,” adding, “She has a very goofy side that is so endearing.”
In conversation, Fanning often gazes around the room searchingly, as though the exact word she’s looking for is hidden in the ceiling rafters. “I’m a big daydreamer,” she muses. “I’m constantly just thinking about things I want to happen, things that did happen. I’m nostalgic for things all the time.” Her innate expressiveness and penchant for fantasy make it easy to see why she has been such an in-demand actress from before she was even conscious of being on camera.
COAT COURREGÈS
SUNGLASSES BALENCIAGA
Fanning began her career at two years old, when her sister, Dakota Fanning, the Hollywood prodigy and youngest person ever nominated for a Screen Actors Guild Award, was cast in I Am Sam (2001). Director Jessie Nelson needed a toddler who looked like Dakota for a flashback scene—enter the younger Fanning, four years Dakota’s junior. It wasn’t until her fifth birthday that she says she started to realise she might have a serious passion for performance.
In 2003, she was cast as the daughter of Jeff Bridges and Kim Basinger in The Door in the Floor, where she remembers spending a lot of time colouring with Bridges, who “taught [her] how to draw legs”—reason enough to love your job. Despite her young age: “I knew I was playing a character. I knew it wasn’t me. There was some story that [director] Tod Williams told in a behind-the-scenes thing of how I was crying and screaming, and then it was cut, and I’m like, ‘Oh, okay, we’re done? Good.’” She credits playacting with Dakota, her only sibling, with helping her make the distinction between real life and make-believe so early on. “Growing up, that was our favourite thing,” she remembers. “We would dress up and create elaborate backstories. We wouldn’t film ourselves, we wouldn’t perform it for people, we were just doing a scene for us. Those are some of the best memories that I have.”
Dakota says her sister has always demonstrated this “immense ability to feel. I think it is one of her most special qualities. She throws herself fully into everything that she does. She is down for anything.”
It has become a trope of Fanning sister profiles to remark upon how “normal” they both are, how unfazed, and grounded they seem despite finding such enormous success so young. Elle chalks that up entirely to their parents and grandmother, who made sure they not only had stability, but a real childhood. “It was important to my parents. My mum really wanted us to go to a regular school,” she explains. “I remember being so excited to raise my hand, like I was in the movies, then I got a test and I’m like, ‘Oh, no.’ There was a little bit of a culture shock at first, but I quickly found friends. My two closest friends to this day are from school.”
Even so, especially being a child star, she admits there were times she felt othered by her classmates. “I was kind of out there,” she admits, with a very Cher Horowitz eye roll.
“I would just dress the way I wanted, like, ‘Well, Sofia [Coppola] likes it!’ I had these Rodarte pants, and I would go to Opening Ceremony and get clothes.” In other words, from a young age, she had a clear interest in high fashion––“which doesn’t mesh into the middle school world of skinny jeans.” The beauty of fashion, for her, has always been the way it allows Fanning to express herself, but also the lens it provides through which to see others clearly. Of some of her red carpet peers, she says, “You can tell when the outfits are wearing them, and it’s okay! Not everyone needs to be a fashion fan. I just want authenticity. Give me authenticity!”
In pursuit of some authenticity of her own, she confesses, “Sometimes I’ll go back––I don’t do it often, but the other day I watched an interview of my 11-year-old self.” In response to my raised eyebrow, she adds with a laugh, “Yes. I Google myself. I think this was probably a 2 a.m. situation.” She found herself watching a clip she’d never seen before from the Venice Film Festival, promoting Coppola’s Somewhere (2010), in which she plays the daughter of a passionless Hollywood actor as he reexamines his life. “It was just some random interview, but I was like, ‘Oh, she was me.’ But she felt like another person. There was a tenderness for myself. I was just like, ‘Oh, she wants to do so good. She wants to say the right thing!’” Fanning adds she is grateful to have worked with Coppola, whom she calls the “queen of teen,” twice, at points bookending that delicate, formative period in her own life. “Who better to shepherd you through girlhood?”
Fanning’s career reads like a who’s who of cinematic auteurs: Alejandro González Iñárritu, David Fincher, and others, along with Coppola. “It’s funny because when you’re young, you’re not thinking about that. You’re not planning it out. It’s about keeping that playfulness and openness to emotions as you get older. You have to be just raw and open and accessible. The camera picks up on all of it. It sees through you. It can see your insides. I don’t know if there’s anything that I would say ‘no’ to. There are definitely boundaries, but if the story is good…” she trails off with a shrug.
The diversity of roles to date comes with a fun list of side quests she relishes: learning to ice skate for Somewhere, playing the trumpet in a scene that ultimately got cut from Ginger & Rosa (2012), and singing on screen for the first time in Teen Spirit (2018). She jokes that this is the true nature of being an actor. “It’s like I can do little things not very well, but I can fake it really well.”
While Fanning may no longer be able to bang out a rendition of “Taps” on command, she reveals that traces of those characters still linger in her personality. “It’s a weird mesh. I don’t think they completely go away,” she says. “I think characters are still inside me, informing decisions I make.” She cites her performance as Catherine in the Hulu series The Great, a genre-bending ride through 18th-century Russia, as a perfect example of this. “She was seen as this young, innocent, slightly naïve, romantic girl that then becomes the leader of Russia. Not that I’m the leader of Hollywood, but her confidence grew, and our lives were mirroring each other. I wasn’t even aware of it, but she was becoming me, and I was her.”
SUNGLASSES MONCLER
bodysuit norma kamali
RINGS CARTIER
Something else she’s come to realise is the serendipitous way people, opportunities, and characters all seem to cycle through her life at exactly the right moment. “I love that, because it means you can’t make a wrong decision. Everything feels fated. We were supposed to do this so we can do that. There are no mistakes.” That was certainly the case with her new film Sentimental Value.
Fanning admits she was desperate to work with Joachim Trier after seeing his last film, The Worst Person in the World. Released in 2021, it’s a life-affirming coming-of-age story about a young woman’s quest for love and meaning in contemporary Oslo (“It’s the best movie in the last decade,” she raves). “My agents didn’t tell me about [Sentimental Value] for a while, until they got a call. They knew I would be hounding them.” But, like she says, the part felt fated, as director Mike Mills, whom she worked with on 20th Century Women in 2016, happens to be friends with Trier. Mills told him he should cast Fanning in the part of Rachel, an American actress woefully miscast in a Norwegian family drama.
She admits she cried when she read the script, and again when she finally saw the completed film at Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Grand Prix this year. “Rachel is not the cliché Hollywood actor. She’s a little lost in her career. She’s famous, but she doesn’t feel very fulfilled. It seems like she’s looking for something deeper, and there are times I’ve totally felt like that. You feel so misunderstood, or you feel like you have more to offer. You’re like, ‘Why won’t they put me in this part?!’ Or you want to break out of that box. Those were all feelings that I can relate to. I don’t ever want to be pinned down. It’s like, why not try it all? I want to taste everything.”
Fanning believes her best work is still very much ahead of her. In 2021, Elle and Dakota started their own production company, Lewellen Pictures (named after their late family dog, a Schnoodle), as a means of taking the reins of their careers. Starting the company together has “widened the lens on everything, because now we don’t necessarily have to act in everything,” she says. “You’re not looking to fit yourself into the equation.”
Working with a sibling might sound fraught to some, but they wouldn’t have it any other way. “We are very, very close and we both have different strengths, which is important. We balance each other out well. She’s kind of like my interpreter,” Elle says. Dakota takes her dreamy notions and puts them into concrete, actionable terms. “We both keep our schedules in practical ways,” Dakota explains. “I keep a Smythson planner, and she keeps a Barbie calendar. If you know us, that makes so much sense.”
Dakota continues, “[Elle] plays an enormous role in my life. We are such a tight-knit family, and our relationship truly means everything to me. I would be lost without her. I am the older sister, but as we have grown, I find myself seeking her advice and perspective more and more. I would die for her, and she knows that!”
“Also she’s my sister, so I can fight with her,” Elle adds, letting out a big laugh.
Now 27 years old, Elle has learned how to navigate all types of difficult dynamics—whether that’s an argument with her sister, egos on set, or being a famous person online. When it comes to social media, she tries to be in the mix, but not too in the mix. “I know what’s going on,” she assures me. “I’ve got group chats with girlfriends. We’re sending each other the memes. I love TikTok, I love to scroll.” When I struggle to describe the tone of her public Instagram account, she offers up with a wry smile, “Tame? There’s some personal things printed in there, but I guess it’s not a place that I necessarily showcase my personality. Sometimes I do. But I’m not, like, Rachel Sennott or something.”
Likewise, when it comes to the details of her romantic life, her instinct is to keep that special feeling private between just the two of them. But it’s clear from her face-splitting smile when I mention Wenner that she can’t help but share the love. “I’m so happy. So happy,” she emphasises. “When you’re in a happy relationship, it’s like, I want to go places with you and share these experiences. I can go to his work things, he can come to mine, and we support each other.” She reminisces about all of the “cool things” and “good music” Wenner has introduced her to since meeting almost two years ago at the debut of her Broadway play Appropriate. These include meeting Lil’ Wayne or seeing Doechii perform live (“Before she really blew up, I would just like to say!”) She beams, “I am just the happiest I’ve been. I really am.”
She may be head over heels for Wenner, but she leaves with one final admission. There is still one man who could come in and sweep her off her feet should he so choose: Jack Black. “Oh my God, I met him at the Golden Globes,” she exclaims, her cheeks flushing at the memory. “My boyfriend was with me and he told him, ‘You’re her hall pass, by the way.’” When asked what it is about the Kung Fu Panda star that she finds so irresistible, she gushes, “Him doing the Sax-a-Boom?! It’s just so sexy. He’s so funny. He’s so kind. He’s so talented, so himself. I think that’s it—authenticity. It’s infectious.” She concludes with a sigh, “Perfect man.”
No matter what the future may hold, Fanning is ready for it, and only becoming more confident by the day. “I’ve grown so much. I can feel it, especially this year with these projects. It’s not that I’m choosing things differently, it’s always been very instinctual,” she says. “But I can tell when there’s a different phase and I feel like I’m hitting a different phase.” She laughs that signature, no-holds-barred laugh. “Whatever the heck that means.”