It is hard to believe, but Dakota Fanning confirms it for us: She is a bona fide acting veteran. Even though she is only just 30, she has been in front of the cameras continuously for 24 years — starting with a Tide commercial at age 6. The next year she landed a plumb opportunity opposite Sean Penn and Michelle Pfeiffer in I Am Sam and in the process became the youngest SAG Award nominee in history.
A number of key roles followed including opposite Denzel Washington in Man on Fire when she was just 10. (Last year, all grown up, she got to reunite with him in The Equalizer 3.) In between there have been a host of roles including June in the Twilight trilogy, opposite Tom Cruise in War of the Worlds, as Lily Owens in Secret Life of Bees, and so much more. Another breakthrough came playing Squeaky Fromme in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. That fortuitous casting was caught by Oscar-winning writer-director Steven Zaillian, who saw it and immediately thought of her as the perfect choice to play Marge in his new Netflix limited series Ripley, a completely new take on Patricia Highsmith’s 1955 novel that has been previously filmed before as Purple Noon in 1960 and The Talented Mr. Ripley in 1999.
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Fanning joins me for this edition of my Deadline video series The Actor’s Side where we talk about her remarkable and lasting career all the way up to her first-ever Emmy nomination this year as Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Limited Series, Anthology or Television Movie. This is defiantly not the Marge we saw Gwyneth Paltrow do in the 1999 film; just one of the differences is that Fanning gets to do it in black and white as she also presents a different take on Marge and her relationship with the psychotic Tom Ripley (played by Andrew Scott).
Fanning also talks about shooting this series all over Italy, being there also to reunite all these years later with Denzel in Equalizer 3, which she says was oddly a similar experience to working with him at age 7. She also talks about her early years but has definite opinions on what a “child star” means, and why she doesn’t relate to ever being called one. We also discuss working with Tarantino, who cast her as a member of the Manson Family, plus so much more including her reaction of getting her first Emmy nomination.
To watch our conversation and to get the “actor’s side” from Dakota Fanning, watch the video above.
Join me each week during Emmy season for another episode of The Actor’s Side.