According to director Deborah Kampmeier, Hounddog’s intense subject matter didn’t linger in Fanning’s mind. “Dakota doesn’t have to hang on to the darkness,” she says. “She knows how to goof around with the other kids on the set. That’s part of her maturity. But she has a state of presence that usually takes years of meditating to find.”
On the afternoon we meet at a café in Brentwood, a bit of a hike from the Los Angeles home she shares with her family, Fanning nibbles a chocolate chip cookie and sips a Coke. Her mother, Joy, who accompanies Fanning to every set—“She’s my best friend and my whole life,” Fanning says—sits a few tables away, chatting with a member of her daughter’s management team. At times, it’s hard to remember that the actress is still a minor; her utter professionalism and unflappable demeanor is at once admirable and amusing. Asked about what kind of music she’s been listening to lately, instead of throwing out such names as Miley Cyrus or Rihanna, she steers the conversation toward the talent and poise of her Secret Life of Bees costar Alicia Keys: “She’s a great actress and so great in the movie and such a beautiful person. I think everybody has a little Alicia in them.” When I wonder aloud if she plays Nintendo, she uses it as an opportunity to plug the Coraline game. “Do you know what?” she replies, when asked whether she was recognized while filming Push on the streets of Hong Kong. “I have a lot of fans in Japan. They really love the movie I Am Sam. And they’re the sweetest people, and every time I go there, they’re just so nice. But Hong Kong, not as much.”
Bees director Gina Prince-Bythewood says she cast Fanning because she truly believed the teenager was the only young actress capable of carrying the film. “Her talent is almost surreal,” she says. “She’s one of those actors who can have fun right before you say ‘Action,’ and then—boom—she’s in it and so in it.”
Fanning’s hypermaturity is so legendary that it has even inspired a hysterical Saturday Night Live sketch. Amy Poehler portrays the young actress as the host of “The Dakota Fanning Show: The Only Forum for Child Actors to Discuss Cinema, Theater, Politics, Philosophy and the Cultural Zeitgeist at Large,” where she condescends to her fellow underage thespians, including Daniel Radcliffe and Abigail Breslin. “I’m not familiar,” she tells them, when they mention a subject any kid would know—Harry Potter, say, or the animated show Family Guy. The SNL version of Fanning watches Charlie Rose and reads Thomas Pynchon. Of The Cat in the Hat, Fanning’s 2003 blockbuster, Poehler-as-Fanning says, “In my defense, when I read that script, I saw it as a metaphor for ethnic violence in Central Africa, but apparently it was about a cat in a hat.”
