Unlike many child stars, Dakota Fanning has successfully transitioned into adult stardom.
In fact, she broke the mold for kid actors, having grown up beautifully and gracefully
right before our eyes. Here's a look at her stunning transformation.
Rejection isn't easy for anyone, especially a young child. Just hearing the word "no"
can send a toddler into a tantrum. But for Dakota Fanning, rejection has always been
pretty easy to deal with, even when she was a girl. In a 2016 interview with The Guardian,
she recalled how she would go to a ton of auditions when she was younger, and she got
pretty used to not getting the part. In fact, she would often reason with herself about
why she didn't land the role and didn't take it to heart. As she put it,
"I had short hair and was different looking. And I would say, 'You know, they probably
just really wanted someone with brown hair, or longer hair.' And my mum would say, 'You're
probably right.'"
That's a pretty fantastic attitude for anyone to have, let alone a five-year-old, which
is how old Fanning was when her mother took her to her very first audition. In the years
since, her ability to brush off rejection has surely come in handy plenty of times.
Fanning's first credited role was an episode of the medical drama ER in 2000. Ever since
then, she's remained busy working, so much so that she almost goes on autopilot while
acting. In 2016, she told The Guardian,
"I know how to hit a mark without looking. I instinctively know where my eye line should
be. That's all 100%. But your character and the story are always different, so the emotional
part is not muscle memory. You're still surprised by stuff and get the adrenaline."
In 2001, Fanning's career took off in a big way. She landed a role in a feature film that
put her right alongside A-lister Sean Penn and helped her make her mark in Hollywood.
That movie was I Am Sam. She starred as Penn's daughter who's caught in the middle of a custody
battle between her parents, with her father's mental capacity serving as an important plot
point.
"You're not like other daddies."
"I'm sorry."
I Am Sam also stars Michelle Pfeiffer, so it's likely that Fanning learned a lot from
the talented and established actors she worked with. As she told Entertainment Tonight,
"Usually, I learn by watching people, by observing them work, observing their personalities,
[and] the way they interact with other people. That's where I've gotten my 'advice' from.
I'm a watcher."
Fanning earned a Screen Actors Guild Award nomination for I Am Sam, quite an impressive
feat considering that she was only seven years old at the time.
2003 was a special year for Dakota Fanning, because that was the year that she landed
a part in the film Uptown Girls. This role would end up meaning quite a lot to her, thanks
to all the time she was able to spend with her co-star, the late Brittany Murphy. In
the film, Fanning stars as Ray, a young girl with a very rigid view of the world. This
allowed her to do a bit of an odd couple routine with Murphy, who played Molly, Ray's light-hearted,
fun-loving nanny.
"Hi!"
"Oh. My. God. You're my new nanny?"
In a throwback Instagram post in 2018, Fanning shared a sweet photo of herself and Murphy
on set along with the caption:
"Brittany Murphy was a ray of sunshine that made every day of filming magical for me."
Murphy passed away in 2009, just six years after Uptown Girls was released, but she still
holds a special place in Fanning's heart.
One of Fanning's biggest roles of her career happened when she was still a kid, in the
2005 apocalyptic action flick War of the Worlds. She plays the daughter of Tom Cruise's character
as their family tries to survive an alien invasion. When she looked back on her time
working on the project, there was one unexpected perk that came to mind. On a 2016 episode
of Watch What Happens Live, she explained how the movie really helped her to develop
a close relationship with her co-star. She revealed that Cruise has sent her a birthday
gift every year since she was 11 years old.
"I always think, like, 'Oh, when I'm 18, he'll probably stop, you know, or oh, 21, he'll
stop, and he, every year, it's really kind."
Working with Cruise must've been an awesome experience in and of itself, and the lasting
relationship they've developed is just the cherry on top!
As Fanning got older, she started to learn a lot more from her roles. Not only was she
honing her craft, she was also absorbing a lot of lessons from the situations her characters
had to go through. For instance, when she landed one of the lead parts in 2008's The
Secret Life of Bees, she learned a great deal about discrimination, one of the film's main
themes. As Fanning revealed to Interview magazine, director Gina Prince-Bythewood put into motion
an exercise in discrimination. The idea behind the exercise was to experience what life was
like living in South Carolina in 1964, which is when the film took place. Fanning explained,
"When we got there, Gina did this mock discrimination against me and [co-star] Jennifer [Hudson]...A
bunch of other actors were…in the drugstore, and Gina gave us a list of stuff to find,
and everyone started really discriminating against us. We got into this whole argument.
It was really eye-opening."
Working on The Secret Life of Bees wasn't just good for Fanning's career, it also helped
her learn a lot about the world.
As hard as it may be to believe, when Fanning was a teenager, she actually had a pretty
normal life. Despite her early showbiz fame, she enjoyed doing typical high school things,
like becoming a cheerleader and making friends. In 2008, she told Interview Magazine,
"[Cheerleading is] so much fun. I get to be the flier, too, which is the one who's on
top of the pyramid, so I get to do all the fun stuff...I made some really good friends.
Cheerleading helped because I met them all over the summer, so I knew people when I first
went to school. Now that I’m in 10th grade, it’s like I’ve been there my whole life.
It’s so normal."
For a child star to feel "normal" is a blessing, especially for someone like who's lived so
much of her life in the public eye. And if Fanning ever wants to play a cheerleader in
a movie, she has plenty of experience to draw from.
One of Dakota Fanning's most iconic credits has got to be The Twilight Saga. She joined
the cast for the second film, New Moon, as Jane, a member of the Volturi vampire family.
Jane was far from the friendliest bloodsucker in the franchise, and as Fanning tells it,
it was actually pretty fun for her to harness her dark side. In 2009, she told Entertainment
Weekly,
"It's one of the first times that I've [played evil]. And this is a character that really
takes pleasure in causing people pain. And that's kind of a fascinating character to
get to play. So that was definitely one of the reasons that I wanted to do it."
For people who were used to seeing Fanning as a sweet and cute little girl on screen,
this turn was definitely shocking, but she absolutely killed it, just as the movies were
killing it at the box office.
"Either we let them do what they were created for, or we end them."
There are definitely a lot of perks to being an actor. There's the money, the fame, and
the glamour of it all. But none of those aspects are what Dakota Fanning really cares about.
She works as hard as she does because she genuinely enjoys it. You might think that
she would burn out at some point, but as she's grown up from her child star days, she's only
gained an even greater appreciation for her field. In 2017, she told Entertainment Tonight,
"When I was younger, I kept doing this because I found it fun. It made me happy. I think
that I still approach what I do with a very childlike spirit. That hasn't changed. I don't
do what I do for any of the other stuff that comes with being an actor. I really do it
for the experience of making work and actually being on set. That's what I live for. That's
where I've always felt most myself."
It's probably that love for her job that has allowed Fanning to continue in her career
without any major hiccups.
Historically, many of the powers-that-be in Hollywood haven't been all that interested
in women's empowerment. As the Time's Up and Me Too movements have demonstrated, too many
men in the industry have exploited their clout at the cost of their female counterparts.
Unsurprisingly, Dakota Fanning is one of the many stars in Hollywood who enthusiastically
supports both movements. As she told The Mercury News in 2018,
"I think people finding their voices and standing up to injustice is exciting. It's totally
time for the conversation to take place."
Fanning is also one to seek out parts that advance women, like her role as Sara in the
TNT period drama The Alienist, and she finds doing so exhilarating. She also really appreciates
getting to work with other talented women. As she told Entertainment Tonight in 2017,
"It's so exciting to be a part of female-driven projects. I love being around other cool ladies.
It's fun to be around women that you look up to, women that you admire, women that inspire
you."
As former child stars transition to adult careers, many observers may wonder if they
have any regrets about their younger days. Perhaps they will come to look back and wish
they hadn't started working so early in life. But you should know that Dakota Fanning doesn't
feel that way. For her, being a child star is part of what makes her life so special,
and she wouldn't change it for the world. In fact, she even gets annoyed when she hears
people make assumptions about her life as a child star. In 2018, she told Variety,
"When I look back and I think of the experiences being an actor has brought me, I just don’t
know a lot of other people our age who have been to the places we’ve been and met all
different kinds of people and the friendships. It’s added so much to my life and it does
kind of hurt me a little bit when people try and somehow turn it into a negative and I
don’t like it."
To put it simply, Fanning has no regrets about working so young, and she doesn't need to
hear anyone else's opinion about it.
Just about every celebrity has had to deal with some sort of controversy at some point
in their careers. Luckily for Dakota Fanning, she knows how to handle controversy with grace
and kindness. In 2019, she caught some flack for her role in the film Sweetness in the
Belly, which tells the tale of a Muslim orphan who grows up to be a nurse in Ethiopia. When
people heard that Fanning was slated to play the orphan, there was some backlash because
of her skin color. Instead of ignoring the controversy or getting defensive, she calmly
responded. In an Instagram story, she wrote,
"Just to clarify. In the new film I’m a part of, Sweetness in the Belly, I do not
play an Ethiopian woman. I play a British woman abandoned by her parents at seven years
old in Africa and raised Muslim."
She also noted,
"It was a great privilege to be a part of telling this story. The film is about what
home means to people who find themselves displaced and the families and communities that they
choose and that choose them."
Looking at where Dakota Fanning is now, it's nice to see that she still has a good head
on her shoulders.
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