A Salute To Elle Fanning, Currently Flexing Her Movie Star Muscles In ‘Predator: Badlands’ and ‘Sentimental Value’

Working as a child actor is notoriously risky for a kid’s emotional, mental, and sometimes physical well-being, even if they become wildly successful; add the possibility of sibling rivalry, and it’s remarkable how seamless a transition Dakota and Elle Fanning have made from kid parts into serious adult roles.

Elle was initially known as the younger sister of Dakota, who played a variety of preternaturally poised and precocious roles throughout the 2000s. But technically, Elle was in movies nearly as long; she played a younger version of her sister’s character in 2001’s I Am Sam. (They’re also siblings in the 2004 English dub of the classic animated film My Neighbor Totoro.) While four-years-older Dakota worked more consistently after that I Am Sam breakthrough, including movies with Tom Cruise, Steven Spielberg, Robert De Niro, and Mike Myers, the younger Fanning did at least a movie year, often many more, from 2003 until 2020. The four-year break from movies that followed (which, given that she started acting at pre-school age, was actually the biggest since she was born) was mostly due to her leading role in the Hulu series The Great, which ended in 2023.

Since then, her profile has been raised considerably; last year she was in the Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown, and this past weekend was arguably the biggest of her career: She’s one of the only human performers visible in Predator: Badlands, where she takes on an ambitious dual role, and she also has a supporting role in the critically beloved Sentimental Value, an Oscar contender from director Joachim Trier (The Worst Person in the World). She plays a Hollywood actress.

This self-reflexiveness seems key to Grown-Up Elle. Pre-2020, the now-27-year-old Fanning was still mostly playing teenagers and college students, parts she took on with a little more naturalism than her hyperverbal older sister. As a child star often appearing in grown-up movies, Dakota Fanning often took roles that felt like turbo-charged (and intensely screenwriter-y) versions of the classic Hollywood moppet: cute, quippy, wise way beyond her years. Filmmakers obviously loved her li’l-neurotic-adult act, and occasionally someone like Steven Spielberg could find a way to make that kind of character feel like a real kid, not just a cynical construction. Mostly – through on fault of her own, obviously – it came across like sitcom poise on steroids. It was even parodied, with affection, on a Saturday Night Live sketch where Amy Poehler played Fanning as an erudite talk-show host whose fellow kid-star guests (and sometimes adult co-workers) were hopelessly below her level.

It’s understand, then, that as an adult, Dakota has gravitated toward a more somber, underplaying style—and that, consciously or not, Elle has avoided glossy precocity. Her key kid role is probably Super 8, where she plays the tween lead character’s crush, who also happens to be a pretty decent amateur actress in the monster movie the kid is making with his friends. Again, this may not have been intentional, but the movie positions Elle Fanning as a scrappier, less over-rehearsed version of a young Dakota: Innately talented, but not showing off her abilities with such hyper-competent precision.

It’s not specified exactly what kind of actress Rachel Kemp, Fanning’s character in Sentimental Value, is supposed to be, though we’re to understand that she’s booked and busy, as well as popular or prestigious enough to serve as a major boon to filmmaker Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgård) when trying to mount his first fiction film in years. Gustav first attempts to cast his movie with his semi-estranged daughter Nora (Renate Reinsve), claiming he wrote the part for her; when Nora understandably rebuffs him, he plows ahead anyway, capitalizing on Rachel’s revelatory recent experience with one of his older films (which happened to co-star his younger daughter). Suffice to assume Rachel Kemp is somewhere in the vicinity of Emma Stone, maybe without the pair of Oscars.

The movie is mostly about Gustav and Nora; Rachel is just a supporting player whose purposes are more narrative than character. She does, however, give Fanning the unusual challenge of playing an actress in the early stages of a project that hasn’t yet started shooting, attempting to wrap her head around a part that clearly wasn’t exactly meant for her. Rachel asks plenty of reasonable questions about this character (clearly based at least in part on Gustav’s own mother, though he won’t fully cop to it), and although her director seems to remain hopeful about it working out—to consider otherwise would be to admit defeat—he clearly needs someone with a more intuitive understanding of his family dynamic. Rachel sincerely wants to be a part of Gustav’s work and is left politely grasping for something he seems to withhold from her intentionally for his own sake, an echo of sorts of his relationship with his daughters. There’s a meta aspect, too, in hiring a fairly well-known actress to serve as a less lived-in version of the movie’s more directly important characters. As in Super 8, she’s allowing herself to become a projection of the male filmmaker’s needs; unlike that movie, he character can’t find a way to do justice to either the part, or her own artistic satisfaction.

Predator: Badlands is not about an actor; it’s not even about humans. But it is about acting human, which is Fanning’s task in one of her two roles: Thia, a “synthetic” (robot) who meets and assists Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi), a member of an alien species that organizes around the idea of hunting and killing others for sport. Thia has been programmed toward a certain level of openness and simulated humanity, which gives Fanning the excuse to play her as a chipper, wisecracking yet optimistic heart-of-the-movie sidekick. To be honest, it’s kind of a cheat – and Fanning seems to relish it. This is one of her most movie-star performances. In fact, Thia is actually doing what a lot of stars do: imitating humanity with an extra boost of charming ingratiation, even if it’s to self-serving ends. To a degree, she does manipulate Dek in order to make herself whole again (her bottom half has been ripped off and left for dead by the same massive beast that Dek is hunting). But her other character in the movie, a more pitiless synthetic called Tessa, serves as the clear counterpoint so we know what true synthetic chilliness can look like.

By playing two robots and an actress, Fanning almost seems to be pre-empting concerns about whether a lifetime in movies and TV has made her a self-conscious performer. It’s also precisely the opposite tack she takes in A Complete Unknown, where she plays the sweet composite girlfriend of Bob Dylan, destined to be left behind. She’s good in that movie, empathetic and unaffected, yet she pops far more in the sillier likes of a Predator movie. Some child actors probably grow up with some difficulty navigating the gulf between movie world and real life. Right now, that gulf seems to be Fanning’s comfort zone.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.