When Elle Fanning was around 14 or 15 years old, she had a cork board in her bedroom adorned with pictures she had printed out from the internet. There were a lot of Tumblr photos and images of It Girl Alexa Chung (“a fashion icon,” Fanning says). Also pinned to that shrine? Images of Bob Dylan.
Fanning had been introduced to Dylan’s music when she was a 12-year-old on the set of Cameron Crowe’s “We Bought a Zoo.” Crowe would play the song “Buckets of Rain” all the time. It piqued Fanning’s interest, so Crowe introduced her to Dylan’s 1975 album, “Blood on the Tracks.” Fanning was hooked.
“It opened up my world,” she recalls, leaning in close to the Zoom camera, her excited face filling the screen. “It was a whole other side of music. It was like I was living in my own fantasy — I would create these future mes and my future self and think of myself doing things and listening to these songs. That’s what it evoked for me.”
Fanning, 26, is starring in “A Complete Unknown,” director James Mangold’s thoughtful Bob Dylan biopic (in wide release Dec. 25), which captures the musician in his nascent era as he prowls the Greenwich Village scene. She plays Sylvie Russo, a character based on Dylan’s one-time girlfriend Suze Rotolo, albeit with a different name. Rotolo, famously, was the girl clinging to Dylan’s arm on the cover of “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan,” the landmark 1963 album that introduced songs like “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright.”
As Sylvie, Fanning brings the perceptive vulnerability audiences have come to expect from her after films like Sofia Coppola’s 2010 “Somewhere,” in which she played a movie star’s wistful daughter, and Mike Mills’ “20th Century Women,” playing a teenager experimenting with her sexuality. Her Sylvie falls in love with Bob, played by Timothée Chalamet, before he breaks big and introduces him to a world of political activism that informs songs like “Blowin’ in the Wind.” Most of her scenes are opposite Chalamet, re-creating the intimate moments of a woman dating someone she’s captivated by but who also keeps her at arm’s length. She then watches as fame pushes him out of her reach. Fanning’s emotive face, even in shots without any dialogue, punctuates multiple key sequences in the film. She expresses the pain of watching a loved one soar beyond her reach — there’s a sense of pride but also a deep sorrow, knowing he can no longer be hers alone.
Crowe says that even as a preteen, Fanning had an open quality to her that made her a match for Dylan’s music.
“She personally sets a tone which is elegant, but it’s wise and uncynical and open to feeling,” he says on the phone. “That just makes her porous to music and to that era of Dylan.”
Fanning, who grew up in Studio City, has been acting since she was 2 years old, sometimes stepping in as a younger version of her actor sister Dakota, before landing parts for herself. When playing the title role in Daniel Barnz’s 2008 film “Phoebe in Wonderland,” about a girl with Tourette’s, she first started to process that acting was a transformation, but Sally Potter’s 2012 “Ginger & Rosa,” in which she starred when she was 13, was even more pivotal for her.
“I always hold that really close to me because I didn’t feel like myself at all when I was playing that character,” she says.
Coppola, via email, remembers loving Fanning from the moment she first met her. “She seemed smart and wise while still being a kid, and had a great sense of humor,” Coppola says, still impressed by the actor’s commitment, even as a child. For an ice-skating sequence, Fanning put in the time to learn how to complete the routine set to Gwen Stefani. (Stefani was Fanning’s first concert.)
“She went before school every day for weeks and then was able to do that whole performance herself,” Coppola recalls.
If there are two recurring themes that come up in conversation with Fanning, it’s instinct and imagination. While she couldn’t exactly make career decisions herself when she was first auditioning (directors like Coppola and David Fincher chose her before she chose them), she does feel like she now has an internal compass that helps her pick projects.
“There’s a real kind of self-confidence that I feel now with my choices,” she says. “I feel kind of uninhibited. Possibilities are endless in a really interesting way.”
She credits much of her fearlessness as a performer to her time spent on the Hulu series “The Great,” on which she played a fictionalized version of Russian empress Catherine the Great. The role was, in some ways, a departure from Fanning’s usual milieu. Whereas a typical Fanning character is quiet and introspective, watching the world around her with curious eyes, Catherine was forthright and ambitious. Not only was she working in a British accent, she was tasked with delivering writer Tony McNamara’s dialogue word-perfect.
“I feel like the challenges of that role set me up for right now,” she says. “I feel like, OK, I can take it on. Bring it. I am so ready.”
Catherine is the character in her oeuvre with whom Fanning feels the most kinship. She says she relates to the feeling of walking into a room and being underestimated. Even through our video call, you can see Fanning’s chatty ebullience come through as she sips from a coffee cup, foam sometimes dotting the top of her lip.
Her Emmy-nominated work on “The Great,” as well as the true-crime limited series “The Girl From Plainville,” which she also produced, kept her away from movies for nearly four years. But 2024 has been a whirlwind of work for Fanning.
At the start of the year she was onstage in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ Tony-winning play “Appropriate,” making her Broadway debut.
“I was definitely a newbie,” she says. “I had to learn the ropes for sure. It’s very different from film, extremely, because you’re trying to re-create this magical moment every time, whereas film those moments are fleeting and you just capture them onscreen, never to be created again.”
After her run in “Appropriate,” Fanning started work on “A Complete Unknown,” which lasted about two and a half months. That was followed by a sci-fi jaunt in the upcoming “Predator: Badlands,” then a flight to Norway to make “The Worst Person in the World,” director Joachim Trier‘s latest, and after that, Barcelona, to work with Brazilian filmmaker Karim Aïnouz. Meanwhile, she also has a production company with her sister, Lewellen Pictures, which has 15 film and television projects in development.
“This year, particularly, has been really special for me,” she says. “I just feel like there’s some growth happening and I can feel the growth happening. It’s odd that you can feel it. It’s in my personal life but also my professional life.” (She reportedly is dating Gus Wenner, CEO of Rolling Stone.)
She adds she can sense herself testing her own limits. “You can sometimes feel when you are pushing yourself more,” she says.
Fanning was excited about the prospect of a Chalamet-starring Dylan movie even before she knew there was a role for her. She was about to play Patty Hearst in a film for Mangold before that project fell through, and had become friends with Chalamet on Woody Allen’s “A Rainy Day in New York.”
“I kind of knew Timothée before the explosion of him,” she says, remembering a shoot during the fall before “Call Me by Your Name” was released. So when Mangold reached out, she leaped at the opportunity. After all, not only did she have those pictures on her wall, she also has one of Dylan’s harmonicas. A producer on the movie “Low Down” gave it to her as a gift.
“I would have done anything,” she says. “It didn’t matter what the part was. I lucked out in a way that I feel so proud to be able to portray this part, but still, I feel like I manifested it.”
Mangold says he has always found Fanning arresting.
“The work is so exquisite and alive and she represents something that is so hard for some actors to do, which is she can bring love and optimism and the spirit of kindness to a role without the character becoming like a greeting card,” the director says on Zoom. “There is such an authenticity to her.”
Fanning and Mangold discussed how Sylvie was a surrogate for the audience. She’s the one who witnesses most intimately how Bob evolves from a kid mythologizing his own life into a superstar mythologized by fans and the press.
Fanning also recognized how important this relationship was to the real Dylan. Sylvie is the only character in “A Complete Unknown” whose name has been changed (she was not a public figure), but that only made Fanning feel like she had more of a responsibility to play her with care. The real-life Dylan even wrote something for Chalamet to say to her during a scene when Sylvie and Bob are having it out. Fanning is not supposed to reveal what that line of dialogue was, but it ended up in a Rolling Stone article anyway: “Don’t even bother coming back.”
“I was always aware that Bob Dylan himself wanted her name changed and that was the one character that he was very precious about,” she says. “Knowing that, I just felt kind of this subconscious weight to want to do justice to what they had.”
While Fanning did her homework, scouring Rotolo’s 2008 autobiography, “A Freewheelin’ Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties,” she also relied on her own imagination to prepare for scenes. She tell me she daydreams exactly how she wants scenes to go, and then adapts to what’s happening on the day.
“My imagination is what guides me and it always has,” she says. “It does in my life and it does in my work. I live in fantasy worlds a lot of the times. Your imagination has to be limitless.”
Before a scene, she has an almost athlete-like mentality, something she picked up from her sports-focused family. (Fanning’s father was a minor-league baseball player, and her mother played professional tennis.) She gets in a zone where adrenaline guides her. “I live off that,” she says. “I love it and it’s scary, actually.”
At the same time, Fanning doesn’t act in a bubble. She is fascinated by the technical side of filmmaking and uses her knowledge of how a shot is composed to help her perform.
“That helps me,” she says. “It comforts me to know.”
It’s a tool she first became aware of when she was 12 and working on J.J. Abrams’ “Super 8.” Acting in a shot, she became conscious of the fact that as the camera pushed in she should gradually show more emotion.
As a child actor, she got tired of playing roles that were mostly about watching from the sidelines. It’s part of what has made her so skilled at conveying so much without many lines. “I remember thinking when I was young, ‘Gosh, I can’t wait to be, like, the adult one day and get to do the thing in a movie,’” she remembers.
Mangold believes that it’s because of her experience as a child actor that Fanning has a “preternatural” understanding of how to use the camera as a tool.
“When you get a good actor, a really good actor, like Elle, faith is really easy,” he says. “You almost want to create the space for her to fill.”
One of those moments in “A Complete Unknown” comes when Sylvie is at the Newport Folk Festival listening to Bob sing “The Times They Are A-Changin’” alongside Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), another woman with whom he is romantically involved — and Sylvie knows that. The camera holds on Fanning’s face as Sylvie has a completely different reaction from the rest of the crowd. Everyone else is going wild; Sylvie is starting to comprehend how she’s losing him.
Fanning loves long takes — like the one in which she sits on a blanket smoking a cigarette, just listening to the music as Sylvie, cycling through different emotions.
“That’s where I feel safe,” she says. “It’s such a cathartic experience for me.”
The way she describes it sounds almost like therapy, excavating herself onscreen.
“I feel things really deeply, and being on set and being able to release those feelings in whatever way it is through a character is everything to me,” she says. “It’s just where I feel the happiest. It’s a really glorious feeling. When I haven’t been on a set for a while, it’s like gosh, my creative energy and my mind and my ideas are just racing.”
Crowe has watched her grow up onscreen. He maintains there’s something “musical” about her acting.
“It’s always musical to me, whether it’s straight-up music to me or not,” the “Almost Famous” director says. “She’s got that kind of rhythm that just suits the poetry and the music.” (After watching “A Complete Unknown,” Crowe texts me: “She’s the unforgettable lingering melody that powers the whole movie and allows Chalamet to soar without a net as Dylan.”)
So what would a teenage, Dylan-obsessed Fanning, crying in the car to “Tangled Up in Blue” and dreaming about her future, think about her adult self now?
“I’m very proud of her,” she says. “I guess it makes you feel like you are right where you are supposed to be.”
