‘I like to shock people’: How Elle Fanning escaped the ‘child star curse’

This story is part of the January 26 edition of Sunday Life.See all 14 stories.

There is a moment in the film A Complete Unknown when legendary singer-songwriter Bob Dylan (Timothée Chalamet) and his girlfriend Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning) must come to terms with a fundamental shift in their relationship.

The scene intentionally nods to Irving Rapper’s 1940s cinematic masterpiece Now, Voyager, in which Jerry Durrance (Paul Henreid) must deal with the transformation of the once peripheral Charlotte Vale (Bette Davis), who has emerged, butterfly-like, from her social and emotional chrysalis.

Chalamet and Fanning’s exchange is electric, an almost perfect tutorial in film chemistry. But it flips the Now, Voyager script. Here, it is Elle’s Sylvie Russo who must contend with the transformation of Bob Dylan from drifting musician to generation-transforming artist drowned in a spotlight she has no desire to share.

What is beautiful about the relationship, Fanning says, is that “Sylvie symbolises the one person who knew him for him before he became Bob Dylan, and loved him, and that love had nothing to do with his fame. She knew that he was incredibly gifted and a genius, and wanted him to cultivate that. She was very inspiring for him.”

But here’s the trick: Sylvie Russo isn’t real. At Dylan’s request, director James Mangold turned Fanning’s character from the real-life woman Dylan loved deeply in the early 1960s – New York-born artist Susan “Suze” Rotolo, who died in 2011 – into a carefully crafted fictional simulacrum. The gesture, Fanning says, was extraordinarily romantic.

Elle Fanning first appeared on camera when she was just two years old.Credit: Danielle Levitt/AUGUST

“Their relationship and the things in the film are based on real life accounts from Bob, or from Susan’s memoir, A Freewheelin’ Time, in which she writes a lot about their relationship,” Fanning says. “But what is actually quite touching is that he felt she didn’t want to be in the public eye, that she was a private person, which is touched on in the film. She didn’t want a public life, so he felt her name should be changed.”

Born in 1998, Fanning has a film resume most actors twice her age would be envious of. She made her film debut in the 2001 drama I Am Sam, playing the younger version of her sister Dakota’s character, Lucy Diamond Dawson. She was not quite three.

“I wasn’t a famous little kid, but ever since I was little, I was acting and in that world,” Fanning says. “Because I had a famous sister, I was surrounded by people looking at us – because they were looking at her. So I was very aware of people noticing us. And if you’re not used to that, it can be unnerving.”

Contrast that with the real-life Suze Rotolo, who did not want the attention at all. “It’s just not the life that was meant for her,” Fanning says. “And I think Bob didn’t treat her particularly well either, at times. It’s nice that she finally gets to stand her ground and stand up to him.”

Elle (right) and Dakota Fanning: “Because I had a famous sister, I was surrounded by people looking at us – because they were looking at her.”Credit: Getty Images

For Fanning, however, the film sits at a complex intersection of fame and autonomy “and who you want to be, versus who people think you are, or tell you to be. That’s what I can relate to, as an actor. Like any artist, you want the freedom to be able to change. And starting from a young age and being a child actor, you do worry. Are people going to let me change? I’m going to get older, and are they going to be OK with that?”

Fanning’s own transition from child to adult actor was relatively smooth. She was born in Georgia, in America’s South, but by the time she was juggling high school and a film career, the family had moved to Los Angeles.

Fanning’s career then moved in stages. There was 2011’s Super 8, directed by J.J. Abrams, which she describes as “the first-time people recognised me for me instead of saying, ‘Are you Dakota Fanning?’ That was a profound moment.”

Then, in 2016, came 20th Century Women, directed by Mike Mills, in which she starred with Annette Bening, and The Neon Demon, directed by Nicolas Winding Refn. Though you could not find two more different films, they are connected in Elle’s memory “because I was 17 when I made both of them, and Neon Demon was a big shift. That’s when I realised that I like to shock people, I like bold choices.”

“Starting from a young age and being a child actor, you do worry. Are people going to let me change?”

Elle Fanning

Then came The Great, written by Australian Tony McNamara and based on his 2008 play of the same name, in which Fanning played Empress Catherine the Great of Russia in some 30 episodes from 2020-23. “I learnt so much as an actor,” Fanning says. “I produced that show and just found my voice in it. I felt like I came into my own: ‘OK, I’m a woman now. People can see me as I am, a woman. I’m not a child any more.’

“I feel very grateful that people have let me change and evolve,” Fanning continues. “But also, like Bob [Dylan], I’m not going to take no for an answer. Because I love doing this. I want to surprise myself, and I love surprising people. I don’t want to be pigeonholed and put into a box.”

Elle Fanning plays Sylvie Russo, girlfriend of Bob Dylan (Timothée Chalamet) in A Complete Unknown.

In A Complete Unknown, while Chalamet is not wholly “method”, he is known for getting deeply into roles. Fanning’s approach to her work is more conventional. However, their techniques are not incompatible, the pair having worked together on Woody Allen’s 2019 romantic comedy, A Rainy Day in New York.

“Everyone on the set [of A Complete Unknown] was profoundly serious about the work,” Elle says. “With Timmy and I, it was different because we knew each other very well. He was the first person I texted when I found out I was going to be in the movie.

“We were both excited that we would get to work together again. There is a warmth and playfulness we have together that’s just so fun, and I think we both realise that. And we actually have a similar energy. Maybe, subconsciously, we’re aware of that and want to bring it into that relationship.”

In conversation, Fanning is a world away from Suze and the serious world of A Complete Unknown. She is talkative, almost giggly. She’s also at ease with the mechanics of a film junket because, as she says herself, there was never a time in her life when such things were not the norm.

Her own image – on a film poster, or reflected in her dressing-room mirror – is more complex. The key detail is that when she looks at herself, she does not see Elle Fanning looking back. This is the case even when, as with Sylvie, the character is visually similar.

“I don’t feel like it’s me looking back – because it’s not the way I would do my hair, wear my dress,” she says. “It is someone else, and I think that that’s very important. Because that’s the armour that goes up for me that makes me able to expose emotions I wouldn’t maybe feel like exposing as myself. It’s important to have that separation.”

But, she adds, she has woken up every day of her life seeing a different girl in the mirror. “There are times when I’m like, ‘So, I look like this today?’ Because I’ve spent so much of my life dressing up as other people. Even when I was a kid with my sister, playing around the house, all we wanted to do was dress up as different people.

“So to be honest, I don’t know what the real me is, because I feel like I have so many different faces,” she adds. “And I like it that way. I’m OK with that. I look different all the time.”

A Complete Unknown is in cinemas now.

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