Elle Fanning reveals ‘disgusting’ reason she lost movie role at 16

Elle Fanning has recalled the ‘damaging comments’ someone made about her when she was just a teenager trying to make her mark in Hollywood.

Actress Elle Fanning said she didn’t get a movie role because she didn’t have sex appeal. Picture: Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images

Actress Elle Fanning says she lost a role as a teen because she was deemed “unf**kable”.

“I’ve never told this story, but I was trying out for a movie. I didn’t get it. I don’t even think they ever made it, but it was a father-daughter road trip comedy,” the Great star, 25, shared during The Hollywood Reporter’s Comedy Actress Roundtable.

Fanning explained that she was 16 years old at the time and recalled “a person” saying, “Oh, she didn’t get the father-daughter road trip comedy because she’s unf**kable.”

“It’s so disgusting. And I can laugh at it now, like, ‘What a disgusting pig!’” she noted, crediting her team with creating a “filtration system” that shielded her from as many “damaging comments” as possible at such an impressionable age.

Actress Elle Fanning said she didn’t get a movie role because she didn’t have sex appeal. Picture: Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images

The actress was just 16 when the ‘disgusting pig’ made the comment. Picture: Neilson Barnard/Getty Images

“I was very protected,” she admitted. “I have an amazing manager and agent who’ve been with me since I was eight or nine, same people.”

Though she was always “immensely confident” in herself, Fanning acknowledged that the dynamics surrounding her upbringing were far from common.

“You’re growing up in the public eye, and it’s weird,” she said. “I’ll look at paparazzi photos from when I was 12 and think, ‘Is that a good thing to see such a mirror of yourself at that age?’

“I don’t feel like it damaged me,” she added, “but it definitely made me very aware of myself.

Elle Fanning is the little sister of actress Dakota Fanning. Picture: Kevin Winter/Getty Images

The sisters – seen here in 2003 – grew up in the Hollywood spotlight. Picture: Kevin Winter/Getty Images

The younger sister of fellow actress Dakota Fanning, 29, feels she has really started to come into her own.

“These days, I feel like my voice matters,” Elle told Harper’s Bazaar UK in April.

“For a while, I’d be like, ‘Oh well, I’m young, people don’t necessarily want to listen to me, they probably know more anyway,’” she explained.

“But there comes a point when you register that you’ve been doing this for 20 years.”

In the same interview, the star revealed that she and her longtime boyfriend, Max Minghella, had broken up.

This story originally appeared on Page Six and is republished here with permission.