Dakota Fanning Says the Pressure to Go From Child Star to Adult Actor ‘Would Make You Crazy’
Anyone alive in the early 2000s knows Dakota Fanning was the only child actor to truly rule the box office. There was scarcely a film that needed a youngster she wasn’t in. When she first started out, Fanning shared the screen with Hollywood heavy hitters like Tom Cruise, Denzel Washington, and Queen Latifah. And she held her own. Most would envy her for becoming famous at a young age. But Fanning, now 28, says the pressure of growing up in the spotlight can drive you crazy.
Dakota Fanning started acting in 1999 at the age of five
Fanning started acting as a child, performing in plays at the Towne Lake Arts Center in Woodstock, Georgia. When she was just five, she made her professional acting debut in a 1999 Tide commercial. Her first major acting role was as a guest star on the NBC primetime medical drama ER.
According to IMDb, Fanning’s role as Lucy Dawson in the 2001 drama I Am Sam catapulted her to fame. She continued to appear in blockbuster movies like Uptown Girls, Man on Fire, and War of the Worlds.
As she grew up, Fanning began playing more mature characters. These include Lily in The Secret Life of Bees, Cherie Currie in The Runaways, and Jane in The Twilight Saga.
Dakota Fanning said the pressure to go from child star to adult actor can make you crazy
Fanning was only 8 when she was nominated for a SAG Award for her work in I Am Sam. While starting young has its benefits, her early success put a lot of pressure on her as she got older. The actor told the Press Association in 2016 about the questions she received.
“People would always say to you: ‘Are you worried about growing up? Are you still going to be able to act?,'” Fanning shared. “It would make you crazy, and it would make you act out or think you need to grow up too fast, and that leads to making mistakes. I’m a very rational, logical person, so that was never an option for me because I don’t want that for my life.”
She continued. “But I can kind of understand it because it could turn you into a very insecure person, very easily.”
Fanning also admitted that it was more difficult for her to land roles as an adult because of the annoying misconceptions that came with her early success. “It’s definitely not as easy of a road when you start out younger because people do develop a lot of preconceived notions about who you are,” she noted. “That’s just frustrating in life in general when people assume things about you without knowing the truth.”
Dakota Fanning’s career as an adult actor
Though it was harder for her to land roles as an adult, Fanning remained active throughout the 2010s. She appeared in independent films like Now Is Good, Night Moves, Very Good Girls, and the biopic Effie Gray.
In 2018, she had major roles in the heist comedy Ocean’s 8 and the period drama series The Alienist. Since then, she’s played Squeaky Fromme, one of the Manson family’s henchwomen, in the Quentin Tarantino film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and First Daughter Susan Ford in the Showtime biographical drama series The First Lady.
In March 2021, Dakota and her sister, Elle Fanning, announced the launch of their production company, Lewellen Pictures. The company has a first-look arrangement with MRC Television/Civic Center Media.
Despite the pressures of growing up in the limelight, it seems like Dakota Fanning is the rare Hollywood success story of a kid actor whose career is still going strong.
