With her role in upcoming thriller American Pastoral, actress Dakota Fanning is set to finally shake off her prevailing image of naïve child star. But, as Natalie Evans-harding finds out, we’ve been wrong about her this whole time anyway.
Dakota Fanning spins on her Stan Smith sneakers, scanning the fashionably twee Manhattan restaurant for her brunch date. Blush sateen duster atop a matching ribbed ballet leotard and jeans, blond hair in a ponytail, she’s as cool and cute as you would expect from an actress who was one of the most successful child stars in Hollywood history.
We’re in her regular SoHo haunt; the spot, in fact, where she first met Ewan McGregor before working on their upcoming film, American Pastoral, together, based on Philip Roth’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. Fanning puts in an expectedly brilliant performance as McGregor’s troubled daughter Merry, radicalized in the name of political terrorism: “Many people describe Merry as mean or crazy, and certainly there’s that side to her, but as the person playing her, you can’t hate your character. You have to find some way to identify with them. Now that I’ve seen the movie, I can see parallels to now. Films can do that; confront you with things that you thought you knew and hopefully subvert that.”
Today, the information 22-year-old Fanning is most anxious to impart is that her fiendishly feline false burgundy nails aren’t of her own choosing – they were applied on The Edit’s shoot yesterday. Nevertheless, last night, back at her “pretty pink all over” apartment (full of antiques, macaron boxes and shot glasses that she collects on her travels), where no-one was watching, she opened a blank document on her computer and did some pretend tip-tap secretarial typing, just to hear the clack of the keyboard. So far, so Dakota Fanning.
Or at least how we think of her. Graduating the difficult child-star transition, but perhaps not quite deserving of the fully-fledged adult title yet; trapped somehow in a charmed yet never-ending adolescence. Because, honestly, what realities can Fanning have experienced? What can those globular, innocent blue eyes really have seen of the world? Acting since the age of six; growing up in Hollywood (with the assistants and the agents and the riders); surrounded by famous types (Katy Perry, Kristen Stewart and the Rodarte sisters, all friends); and Daddy (well, at least Daddy-in-a-movie, Kurt Russell) buying her a pony for her 10th birthday?
“It’s the thing I hate,” Fanning almost spits out over her breakfast. “Hate! No one knows you better than you know yourself. And you have someone going, ‘I don’t think you’re like that…’ or, ‘I don’t think you’re able to do that...’ I’m sorry?” she scoffs. “We’ve never met. You have no idea about me. What are you talking about?” Then she smiles, forking her omelet. “Being empowered to say no is pretty cool. Even when I was little, any of my friends or family would say, ‘Dakota doesn’t do anything she doesn’t want to.’ And I don’t. I’m very sensitive to energy and vibes, and if a vibe is off somewhere, then I’m out. I’ll just go. If it’s not working for me? Just no.” One such vibe is Hollywood’s social charade. “[At] those parties there’s this culture” – she takes a breath to ham up an affected, Daisy in The Great Gatsby voice – “‘Oh! You’re an actor? So am I! So we’re friends!’ Well, maybe we could be friends, but we’re certainly not yet. We don’t even know each other! I would rather be with my real friends at a dive bar on a Friday night, you know?”
Of course, this is not to say Fanning leads a perfectly normal life, even for an actress. Despite maintaining a relatively passive role in the casting process (“Approaching a director is just not me. When it feels like you’re clamoring for someone’s attention? No, it’s really ok if you don’t want me to be in [your film]!”), she’s sent a constant stream of scripts. What wouldn’t make the cut? “Don’t do a role that isn’t complicated enough for you. It’s ok to say no to parts if it doesn’t serve you, or the story. Or the [gratuitous] sex scene? It could be a great project, but you don’t need that. Sometimes it’s hard to stick to but, ultimately, it pays off.”
Fanning’s schedule means she can film three movies back-to-back for eight months, followed by eight months off, though she’ll usually be promoting her movies during the ‘break’, all the while determined to graduate from her flexi-time studies at New York University.
Only rarely these days does she audition. Not so long ago, she approached her friend Kirsten Dunst (“We vibe so much”) to ask if she’d like to direct a new adaptation of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, which Fanning herself is co-producing and starring in.
“We want to make a cinematic experience,” says Fanning. “A lot of people have this idea of The Bell Jar being dark and depressing, and that it’s Plath’s biography. It’s not; it’s a novel. There’s a lot of humor, irony and light – those are things we want to bring out, the parts people don’t think of right away.”
And then, of course, there’s the unusual addition of a little sister, Elle, also a highly-regarded young actress. There’s a perception that these two Peter Pan beauties are in perpetual competition. “People unfortunately love to see conflict. And if it’s between family? Between sisters? Even better,” says Fanning. “The assumption that we’re really competitive, that people even ask that, is horrible. It’s implied our family [is] torn apart by jealousy. It shows people don’t pay attention to who we are, just surface stuff: sisters, blond, blue-eyed, kind of the same age… We don’t even think we look alike! Our personalities are worlds apart; we both feel that, we both know that. Anyone who knows us knows that.”
In fact, the family are incredibly tight-knit, and the sisters jet back for vacations as often as their schedules permit. “If my Mom doesn’t hear from me in a day, I get The Text,” Fanning teases. “Which is like” – she puts on her best ‘Mom’ voice – “‘Well, you never called…’ or something passive-aggressive like that. Then I do the exact same thing to her,” she laughs.
Despite the close family bonds, Fanning is fiercely independent and content in her own company. “It actually comes from being a bit of a control freak,” she admits. “I don’t like anyone doing anything for me. There are all these people on set who want to take care of you – ‘Can I get you water? Do you want this? Are you hungry? Are you tired? Do you want a Coke? Are you cold?’ It comes from a lovely place, and some [actors] need that, and that’s fine. Me, I feel like if you give into that, you become this person who doesn’t know how to do anything for yourself. I take a lot of pride in [being self-sufficient]. I’m a proud person.” She can be alone for months on end, she says, without company. “A lot of the time [actors] have people who travel with them, but I’m not afraid of being alone. I crave it.”
Suggest Fanning is uptight at your peril. When asked how she escaped her teenage years so elegantly, without one catastrophic incident, she replies, “That you know of! It’s not to say I was a bore,” she continues, a touch defensively, “or that I didn’t have fun, or make mistakes. But ultimately I made good decisions. Firstly, I [could] get in trouble with my parents. Secondly, it might jeopardize what you love doing, or it might make someone think differently of you… So let’s not.”
You can’t really blame her for that strict self-control. Even nowadays, when we think of Hollywood becoming that little more accepting, “There are still people out there who are stuck in some dark age,” says Fanning. “Like the people who write mean comments on the internet. People seem to care about who you are in real life, and that’s a good thing when it’s met with love and acceptance, but a bad thing when the same people say, ‘Oh, but that [comment]’s not ok!’ It can be very confusing to know what’s going to be welcomed and what’s not. That causes [actors] to say, ‘Well, I’m just not going to say any of it.’”
And so this is how Dakota Fanning navigates her maturing fame; with a touch of class, Old Hollywood smoke-and-mirrors style, schooled by veteran role models like Glenn Close and Steven Spielberg.
“I’m not an open book, I’m never going to be, and I’m comfortable with that,” says Fanning. “At the shoot yesterday, the photographer said, ‘I know who you are: I know what you’re about!’ And I said, jokingly, ‘No, you don’t. You don’t know me at all!” she laughs. “I’m a very mysterious person and I like it…” And he said, “Dakota, that tells me everything!’”
With that, telling us everything and nothing, she must leave to meet her girlfriends: they compete in a regular pub quiz. “We won last week!” she grins, spinning on those sneakers, even cooler and cuter than we first thought.
American Pastoral is out Oct 28
