(PHOTOS) Elle for Vanity Fair

Elle is on the cover of Vanity Fair October’s issue featuring a wonderful new photoshoot by Tierney Gearon.

Elle Fanning has been acting since she was two. She’s 22 now, and there are estimates that she’s logged some 60 roles in her career, which would mean she’s already headed for Streep territory. During a Zoom call, I ask if this is true, or even logistically possible.

She tilts her head. “Could that be?” she wonders. “You know what? I did write it down one time, and I think I still have it on my phone.” She whips out a pink phone emblazoned with a sticker of the cartoon juggernaut Strawberry Shortcake. Her fingers fly.

“Thirty-six,” she announces finally.

The former child star recently triumphed with what she refers to as her “first woman role” as Catherine the Great in The Great—Hulu’s raunchy, rollicking, and, at times, gleefully ahistorical account of the monarch’s bold rise to power—but, at home, her life is reeling decidedly backward through time. Like many of us, Fanning has retreated to a safe space during the coronavirus pandemic. She’s cocooning in place at her mom’s house in the San Fernando Valley with her 26-year-old sister and fellow actor, Dakota; their mother; their grandmother; and the family’s elderly pet schnoodle (mini schnauzer-poodle), Lewellen.

Read More

(PHOTOS) Leaving Lancer x dermatology

Elle was photographed while she was leaving Lancer x dermatology with her mom in Los Angeles the other day, September 18. Be sure to head over to the gallery for the latest candids.

(PHOTOS) Running errands in Los Angeles

Elle was seen while she was running errands in Los Angeles the other day, September 9. You can find the newest candids in the gallery.

(PHOTOS) Elle for C Magazine’s 15th Anniversary Edition

Elle Fanning’s Bright Future

The actor’s darkly comic portrayal of a young Catherine the Great could be the role that defines her. With a second season in the works and a burgeoning career as a producer, things are heating up for fashion’s favorite polymath

Since she started working in the movie business a whopping 20 years ago, Elle Fanning, who turned 22 earlier this year, has collaborated with some of Hollywood’s most exciting directors. Among them: David Fincher for 2008’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button; Sofia Coppola for 2010’s Somewhere and 2017’s The Beguiled; J.J. Abrams for 2011’s Super 8; Mike Mills for 2016’s 20th Century Women; and Alejandro González Iñárritu for 2006’s Babel.

But Fanning’s first major role in television may wind up being her career-defining moment. In The Great, she stars as Catherine the Great, Russia’s longest-ruling female leader, opposite Nicholas Hoult as the dastardly Peter III. Alongside Normal People, the series became one of Hulu’s biggest streaming successes during the pandemic, and the platform says it will commission a second season.

As viewers gleefully discovered, this is not your average, run-of-the-mill Catherine the Great — nor anything at all like the one portrayed last year by Helen Mirren in HBO’s limited series. No, this is Tony McNamara’s Catherine the Great. You might know McNamara because he co-wrote 2018’s The Favourite, which won Olivia Colman an Oscar. The Great is very much in the mold of that film, meaning it’s hilarious and absurd, offering a side of Fanning we haven’t gotten to see much during the last two decades.

“I’m not a dramatic actress, but I tend to do more drama,” Fanning explains over a bowl of Italian wedding soup at Little Dom’s in Los Feliz, just as COVID-19 begins to turn Los Angeles upside down. (She was actually scheduled to go to Budapest a few days after this interview to co-star opposite her sister, Dakota, for the first time on screen in The Nightingale, a World War II drama that has since been put on hold.)

Read More