In a new interview for Billboard, Elle talked about wanting to play a popstar and the feeling of letting loose on stage. The article drops some of the big names she got to work with while recording tracks for Teen Spirit, and explains the song selection by director Max Minghella. You can read it in full below. Additionally, our gallery has been updated with a photo session featured in the March 9 issue of the magazine.

“I always had this dream of being a pop star,” says Elle Fanning. Sitting at a corner table at West Hollywood’s Chateau Marmont in a gauzy ivory dress, the 20-year-old actress is so happy to be talking about how her dream finally came true in the new movie Teen Spirit that she lets her mint tea go cold. “That feeling, like I can just let loose and perform, was so attractive.”

In Teen Spirit, Fanning plays Violet Valenski, an introverted but tenacious English teenager who enters a singing competition in the hopes of escaping her dreary home life. Throughout the movie, Fanning sings various pop showpieces, in the end taking the stage in front of a live studio audience to deliver a primal performance of an unexpected song. To anyone familiar with Fanning’s career, her magnetism onscreen is no surprise. Still, watching her as Violet is like witnessing a best new artist Grammy winner at the moment of birth.

Written and directed by first-time filmmaker Max Minghella (perhaps best known as Nick on Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale), Teen Spirit, which LD Entertainment and Bleecker Street will release on April 5, follows Violet from her humble beginnings, half-heartedly singing ballads in a local pub, to the titular televised competition. The role required Fanning not only to cover existing songs like Robyn’s “Dancing on My Own,” but to also record an original track with producer Jack Antonoff, which Fanning calls a “super surreal” experience. “Jack did [Taylor Swift’s] reputation. He recorded [Lorde’s] ‘Green Light,’” she says. “I felt like, ‘Wow — maybe I am good.’”

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