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It’s officially Elle Fanning season.
The ebullient young actress stars in two radically different movies in theaters now: the box-office smash “Predator: Badlands,” an unlikely buddy comedy between a robot (Fanning) and an extraterrestrial (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi), and Joachim Trier’s crushing Oscar hopeful “Sentimental Value,” in which she plays a winsome Hollywood star named Rachel Kemp, who’s eager to plunge into higher-brow fare.
It's a perfectly peculiar double feature that Fanning herself has dubbed “Sentimental: Predator.”
“When you watch the ‘Predator’ film, he is kind of sentimental,” the three-time Golden Globe nominee says with a laugh. She filmed the projects back-to-back last August, and quite literally flew to the European set of “Sentimental Value” the morning after she wrapped “Badlands” in New Zealand.
“They spoke to each other in ways that I didn’t realize,” Fanning says of the disparate movies. "Rachel is an action star, she’s been in blockbusters and probably has a big franchise herself. And then for me, going to Norway, working on this deep film with Joachim – it does feel very meta (laughs).”
'Sentimental Value' star Elle Fanning breaks down that 'remarkable' monologue
“Sentimental Value” (in theaters in New York and Los Angeles, expanding nationwide through November) follows an esteemed Norwegian director named Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgård), who tries to cast his estranged daughter, Nora (Renate Reinsve), in a film inspired by a family tragedy. But when she declines the project, he instead turns to the well-intentioned Rachel, who's a somewhat awkward fit for the role of a melancholic mom.
Fanning, 27, is heavily predicted to earn her first Oscar nomination for the drama, thanks in part to a standout monologue as Rachel tearfully tries to convince Gustav that she’s capable of serious acting. Rehearsing around a kitchen table, Rachel surprises herself with the well of emotion she can draw from.
“There are so many ideas I wanted to capture in that moment, because it’s the first time that the audience gets to see Rachel is talented,” Fanning says. “But she also has to be slightly off because I’m ultimately playing someone who is miscast. You feel her longing and excitement that she’s finally worthy, but it’s also not quite right.”
Trier says he was most impressed by the way that Fanning captures “the full spectrum of Rachel’s journey,” from a naïve starlet to “someone of enormous integrity and real vulnerability. We’ve seen Elle grow up in movies, so now to see the force and strength of her as a performer is really remarkable.”
Fanning got her start in Hollywood at age 2 in 2001’s “I Am Sam,” playing the younger version of her sister Dakota’s character. She has worked with J.J. Abrams (“Super 8”) and Sofia Coppola (“Somewhere”), and appeared in everything from blockbuster franchises (“Maleficent”) to A-list awards dramas (“The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”). Along the way, she’s continually upended expectations of the types of roles she can inhabit.
As a teenager, “ ‘Neon Demon’ was something that really shocked people and I love shocking people,” Fanning says. “ ‘Ginger & Rosa’ was also the first time I felt like I was not myself.” More recently, Hulu’s dark comedy series “The Great” taught her “how to embarrass myself and that it’s OK to fail. I don’t get embarrassed easily anymore; I’ll do anything.”
How sisters Elle and Dakota Fanning carved their own paths in Hollywood
Fanning says the depiction of modern Hollywood in “Sentimental Value” is “pretty spot-on,” from the inane questions that Rachel fields at a press junket, to the character’s anxious team of smartphone-clutching reps that trail her every move. (“My agent and manager and publicist have seen the film, and they were dying,” Fanning recalls. “I’m like, there you guys are running after me!”)
But the actress also saw herself in the film’s central relationship between Nora and her younger sister, Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), and the ways that they tenderly support each other through difficult moments. Fanning is best friends with her older sister, Dakota, 31, who similarly started acting as a very young kid.
“We had a really emotional experience watching it,” Fanning says. “Joachim put on screen what it feels like to have an older-younger sister dynamic: Who becomes the protector and how does that change as you get older? It really touched us.”
Fanning will next portray a young Effie Trinket in 2026's “The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping.” The movie’s casting team reached out to her after months of fervent demands on social media that she play the eccentric fashionista. (“The fans had been down their throat about it, and they were like, ‘We need to call and ask,’ ” Fanning recalls, chuckling.)
She will also co-star with Dakota in a big-screen adaptation of Kristin Hannah’s 2015 novel “The Nightingale,” about two sisters during World War II. It’ll mark the first time the siblings will share scenes.
“When we were younger, we tried to keep things separate businesswise, because we really wanted to carve our own paths,” Fanning says. “Now that we're older, we feel like we can merge. We started our production company together, and she really grounds me. I’m very (out there) in my ideas and she has the logistics of how things will go. So we balance each other in that way.”
Otherwise, “we definitely gossip about our film sets and what’s going on, but we don’t ask each other for advice on what to do and we’ve never run lines together. But we’re going to have to soon!”
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Elle Fanning explains why she got 'really emotional' watching new film with sister Dakota
Reporting by Patrick Ryan, USA TODAY / USA TODAY
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