Dakota Fanning has spent much of her career being asked to prove that she has grown up. The premier child actor of the aughts has been burdened with the same narrow, repetitive narrative since 2000: How would she finally make the transition from a precocious young star to an adult actor?
“I think people get locked into a certain view of growing up as a child actor,” she says. “I hope that maybe I’ve expanded someone’s view of what it can look like.”
Fanning is calling from an apartment in New York, her whiteboard busy with a schedule of the scenes she’s due to film for a project she can’t talk about yet. She is as giggly and gracious as she seems on late-night talk shows, often addressing me by name—though that may have as much to do with her upbringing in Georgia as her many years of practice talking to the press.
Following sharp turns in a succession of sleek streamer dramas—Ripley and The Perfect Couple on Netflix; All Her Fault for Peacock—Fanning’s latest performance, in The Sun Never Sets, mumblecore auteur Joe Swanberg’s first film in a decade, is perhaps as demonstrative of who she is at 32 as anything else she’s made recently. The indie casts Fanning as Wendy, an IPA-drinking construction worker in Alaska. All of her friends are having babies and Wendy is desperate for one too, but she’s caught up in a love triangle with her shambolic ex, Chuck (Cory Michael Smith), and Jack (Jake Johnson), a father of two kids who doesn’t want anymore. “I can relate to all of that as somebody who really does want kids,” Fanning tells me. “I wouldn’t be in a relationship with somebody who doesn’t want them.”
Swanberg typically begins with a rough outline for his films rather than a traditional script. “It’s a lot of improvisation and collaboration,” explains Fanning. “So you end up bringing a lot of yourself to it. We would just go on these tangents, talking about our own experiences, and then we made a movie out of them.” She was keen to make use of her experiences with dating in particular. “That’s obviously the world I inhabit as a single girl. You know, I do find myself getting cynical about dating, but what I love most about Wendy and the film is that it isn’t cynical. It shows the reality of being a person trying to form relationships, and everyone’s doing their best.”
Fanning’s younger sister, Elle, recognized her in the role immediately. “When she watched the movie, she was like, ‘People are going to think that they’ve never seen you in a role like this, and I think that’s true,’” Fanning recalls. “But she also said, ‘What they might not know is that it’s so you.’” Wendy, she adds, “is the person my family and friends know me as.”