Elle Fanning: “I’ve grown up”

This article is published in number 1 of Vanity Fair on newsstands until January 5, 2020

Elle Fanning has been acting since she was two. He is now 22, and has already racked up 36 roles. He talks to me from his “home office” in his mom’s house in the San Fernando Valley, Los Angeles. The Hulu TV series The Great, which has been confirmed for a second season, has made her the emerging queen of dark comedy.

Freely inspired by the rise of Catherine the Great, empress of all Russia, you see Fanning as the sovereign alongside Nicholas Hoult who plays her husband Peter III.

The actress cites Katharine Hepburn as a model, but it reminds me more of the Jodie Foster and Gwyneth Paltrow of the early days of Emma e Shakespeare in Love, two memorable interpretations. Fanning has the same kind of crispness and intelligence, fluidity and intuitiveness: you never notice he’s acting.

Like her sister Dakota, aged 4, she grew up without incurring any of the slips typical of little stars. He spent his childhood in Conyers, Georgia. His mom, Joy, played tennis in college, his dad was a junior league baseball player. His grandfather was quarterback of the Philadelphia Eagles (her parents, meanwhile, got divorced, ed). There were all the prerequisites for thinking that the girls would be sports, but, very soon, the two sisters also developed a familiarity with acting, staging theatrical performances at home. In one of these, the Fanning even wanted to try their hand at the interpretation of a dramatic birth.

Dakota was the mother and Elle the child who was born into the world. I ask her if ketchup was also used in the scene and she laughs. “No,” he replies, “no blood or gory details.” Growing up in the Valley, Elle and Dakota were brought up to be nice and help out with housework, they were never treated like little Hollywood stars. “In the family we have always behaved following the typical values ​​of the South, good manners and respect for older people,” says Elle.

The sisters’ first adventures as professional actresses are intertwined with each other. During the summer course of a local theater, Dakota had the starring role in a production called Rainbow Fish and was noticed by a talent scout who advised her mother to accompany her to New York or Los Angeles. In 2000, Dakota won a part alongside Sean Penn and Michelle Pfeiffer in My name is Sam, and little Elle played the role of Dakota as a child.

In 2005, at the age of seven, Fanning played the daughter of Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett in Babel, the tormented and globetrotting film by Alejandro González Iñárritu. “Elle has always been a very ‘present’ actress,” says the director. “She’s not the classic nervous girl, who gives weight to bullshit, who looks around all the time, the ‘who’s watching me?’ When he laughs, he really laughs. When he listens, he does it for real, unlike many people who pretend to listen to you. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone with greater emotional intelligence than yours. ‘

Iñárritu particularly remembers an intense scene shot in the middle of the night, the car chase in the desert, in which Fanning and the boy who played his brother were hunted down by the police. Says Iñárritu: «I explained to her:“ Okay, when I say this word, you turn to your brother and start crying, then you look at the man on your right, you are terrified, you lose control and cry even more intensely ”. And believe me, every time – we repeated the scene 17 times – he did it perfectly, with the same intensity and precision ». He laughs and adds: “When the other guy was overwhelmed with fatigue, she started directing him. It said, “Let me help you. When was the last time you didn’t get a gift you expected? Close your eyes and remember that day ”. He was giving him instructions so that certain emotions would go straight to his heart. ‘

At the top of Fanning’s favorite films there is The garden of virgin suicides, which in 1999 marked Sofia Coppola’s directorial debut, and which the actress considers her training work, even though she was only two years old when it came out in theaters: “I have photographs of the Garden of Virgins Suicides all over the walls” , he says, and points out that the first pseudonym of his private account on Instagram was @virginsuicides. “It was so beautiful and surreal, I wanted to live in that world.” Growing up, she got to work on two of the director’s films, Somewhere, of 2010, and The deception, 2017. Shot in and around New Orleans, The deception For Fanning it was an experience equivalent to leaving home to go to college: “I was 18 and my mom no longer had to accompany me to the set: an important turning point. My mom had known Sofia since I had done it Somewhere and the other lead in the film, Kirsten Dunst, was a friend of the family, so she said, “Okay, I feel comfortable since you’re working with people I know.”

Before The Great, Fanning had never acted in a play. Her Catherine is reminiscent of a pastel-colored painting by Fragonard, but she makes every joke perfectly ironic (“Give me a bear and stop punching me: what woman wouldn’t be happy?”) And finds the human side in a young woman. woman who goes from insecurity to a growing awareness of her own power. Fanning’s interpretation makes some of the most absurd scenes real, like the one where there is a dinner table “laden” with lemon sorbet and the heads of beheaded Swedish soldiers. Nicholas Hoult, aka Peter III, confesses that he hasn’t always been able to hold back the laughter: “When the giggle takes hold, it becomes difficult to maintain self-control,” he says. “She makes it look easy.”

When Catherine first meets Pietro, she realizes in an instant that her romantic-girl fantasies about marriage were a hoax: he’s an 18th-century version of a male chauvinist boy from a college fraternity today. Emotions appear simultaneously on Fanning’s face: there is sadness, shock, humiliation and an almost imperceptible anger. The actress dives so deeply into a role that she can, at times, blush on command. «I blush so much on my lips. Sometimes make-up artists have to put foundation on me because, when I get nervous, they get too red. ‘

The real Catherine the Great, who seized the throne during a bloody coup d’état and then ruled from 1762 to 1796, was – as described in the series – an advocate of the Enlightenment ideals of science and art. She had been vaccinated against smallpox, had written several books and pushed for the reform of the school system in Russia. Perhaps, because she had the impudence to be one of the most powerful monarchs in the world and also a woman, she had been the subject of slander, rumors that she had sex with horses, a legend that has endured for centuries. “The real Catherine the Great was a very sexually free woman and people disparaged her for that reason,” says Fanning. “Sex plays a central role on this show and I was very excited to explore this side of my work.” He laughs. “Personally, I love being naked. I walk around without
nothing on all the time. It is part of life ».

The Great is in line with the themes of the moment, from the frequent criticisms of how wealth and privilege often foster injustice to the clearly feminist orientation of the script. And beyond that, the cast is diverse. Says Fanning: «From Hulu they asked us: ‘Are we going to accurately recreate the way Russia looked at that historical moment?’ We wanted to go in the opposite direction of historical truth. Who wants to watch a boring series set in the past and played by a group of whites? », He makes a gesture with his hand as if to reject the idea. “It’s something you’ve already seen, taken for granted and boring.”

Fanning has the feeling that, not unlike Catherine, she is finding her voice and self-confidence. “It had to grow inside of me,” he says. At first, in business meetings, he would desist from expressing a different opinion. «I would have thought: ‘Am I saying mine?’ And, sometimes, I would be too scared and let it go.

As time goes by, I understand. Why do I say to myself: You’re too young, do you have to listen? Why am I sorry? Yes, I’m young, but I’ve been working in this sector for a long time and my opinion counts ».

Also on the social level, Fanning has precise ideas, and is keen to have his say. Last May, during the protests following George Floyd’s murder, Fanning made donations, demonstrated, confronted family and friends, e-mailed government officials: “Black Lives Matter can’t be a fashion, but a movement that must remain alive, and we must commit ourselves every day ». At such a difficult time in history, Fanning finds it difficult to talk about career or family. He only says that he is choosing projects that “through art, will create a debate between people of different opinions”.

At the end of our meeting, Fanning insists on showing me his bedroom. He leaps up and takes the computer with him. Walk quickly through a spacious white corridor, and enter a room with floral wallpaper. “Here’s my room,” he says, spreading his arms. There are piles of scripts and books everywhere in what she calls “organized chaos.” On the bed are pillows with white pillow cases decorated in a style called grandmillennial – a term made up of grandma, grandma, and millennial – which favors floral motifs, upholstery, and embroidery.

He gestures to a paper calendar hanging by the door with a vintage Barbie on it. “Look,” he says, “it’s written here. Do you see? ». His finger moves across the page: Vanity Fair, 1 pm Then he shows me a painting by Lowbrow Art artist Mark Ryden, of a girl whose body is a cake cut with a knife by a man. It was the first work she bought when she was a girl. He hadn’t noticed the phallic image at the time. “I just liked the way she looked, but then my mom realized it was a picture of the loss of her virginity,” she says.
Fanning loves spending time in his bedroom, randomly chasing his thoughts down the White Rabbit’s lair. Daydreaming, we agree, is an art that is waning. “I can just sit and think for hours,” she tells me. “My mind can go to infinite strange worlds and bizarre places.” He smiles. “I think it means I’m doing the right job, because acting has a lot to do with the imagination. For me, it is the main ingredient, because it is difficult to describe what your “method” is in quotation marks “. I ask you to give me an example of your daydreams. He responds immediately, which I find touching: the courage he displays in his acting is reflected in his character for the kind of sincerity and emotional vulnerability that many of us, through long practice, hide with jokes or cynicism. Recently, she says, she has been thinking about the kind of house she would like to live in and how it would be designed. “Or, I think about how I want my life to be,” she continues, sitting on the bed. “I know I want a lot of children and I wonder what kind of mom I would be.” Pause.

«The other day I was thinking about the Neverending Story, one of my favorite films, and I was wondering: ‘What kind of world would I invent, how detailed?’ As I got older I got better at expanding the boundaries of my mind and also at not apologizing for my weird thoughts. “

Next year, when the pandemic – hopefully – begins to run out, and Fanning can return to the sets, he will search for his home. For now, let’s allow her, and allow herself, to stay a little longer in this quiet room with the padded headboard and limited edition Barbie collection. He will have to leave her, a
day. But the time has not yet come.

To subscribe to Vanity Fair, click here.