Dakota Fanning Just Wants To Work

By Emma Chance | Celebrity | October 3, 2024 |

By Emma Chance | Celebrity | October 3, 2024 |

Dakota Fanning has been my favorite actress of late. When I saw her in The Alienist a while back, I was like, “Oh, right! I forgot about Dakota!” Since then, she’s consistently appeared in shows I’ve loved—Ripley, The Perfect Couple. She seems to have carved out a place for herself as someone who can play the unassuming, straight-faced woman with complicated psychology simmering under the surface.

The thing about Fanning is that she’s always been around, at least as long as I’ve been watching movies and TV. She’s been doing this since she was a kid, but I kind of forgot she was a child star, because she didn’t occupy the same space as women like Lindsay Lohan or Drew Barrymore before her.

“You seem to have evaded this young-Hollywood tabloid phenomenon…Was that something you or your family was conscious of?” She was asked in a recent interview for The Cut.

“Yeah, all of that has been deeply shoved down my throat,” she said. “In interviews at a young age, I remember journalists asking me, ‘How are you avoiding becoming a tabloid girl?’ People would ask super-inappropriate questions. I was in an interview as a child and somebody asked, ‘How could you possibly have any friends?’ It’s like, Huh?”

“I have a lot of compassion for people who have been made into examples. If society and the media hadn’t played their part, who knows? I don’t think that it’s necessarily connected a hundred percent to being in this business; there are other factors, too. I just didn’t fall into it…I was always treated with respect. It was never ‘Bring the kid in! Get her out!’ I wasn’t working with people who treated me that way—I was being respected as an actor and as equal as you can be for that age.”

Fame is obviously still a part of it, but she thinks of herself as separate from that. For her, it’s all about “the work.”

“The work is the thing that I like. So the stuff that comes with it, this part of it, it’s not the thing that I like as much. I don’t get dressed to walk down the street. That’s just not me. I am just an actor.”

Who’s to say if the true “tabloid girls” felt any differently, but it’s working for her now. And while the industry might have changed for the better, she says there are “still pressures,” like the pressure to play “strong female characters.”

“I don’t even know what that is,” she says. “I just like to play characters that I think are going to be challenging as an actor. I don’t feel this pressure to play a likable character. I want to play complicated women, but isn’t that what everyone wants? All people are complicated.”