Get to know Elle Fanning

Elle Fanning started acting when she was 2 years old. Now, at 21, she's the youngest person ever to be selected for the Cannes Film Festival jury. This is her story.

Elle Fanning Teen Spirit


Elle Fanning is the youngest juror at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival. The 21-year-old actress joins three other women and five men on the jury, which includes director and jury president Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu, who she worked with on the 2006 international drama, Babel.


Born Mary Elle Fanning on April 8, 1998 in the small city of Conyers, Georgia, she is the daughter of minor league baseball player Steven Fanning and professional tennis player Heather Joy Arrington. In 2001, she played a younger version of her sister, actor Dakota Fanning, in one of her first film appearances, I Am Sam. She landed a lead role in JJ Abrams' Super 8, in 2011, then went on to work with director Sophia Coppola twice, playing the lead in Somewhere, which won her the Young Hollywood Award for Actress of the Year and as part of the ensemble in The Beguiled, which won Coppola Best Director at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival.


The original movie was from a male point of view, the soldier's point of view, of these women's world and I thought it would be so interesting to go back and find the book and tell the same premise but from the women characters' point of view.


Now, Fanning combines singing and dancing in her latest film, Teen Spirit, where she plays a Polish immigrant becoming a pop star.


“My grandmother is from Germany and she was an immigrant herself. She came to America so there was something about you becoming the character of feeling kind of like the outsider a bit in that which was very touching and add a lot of layers to her. I think that everyone needs to be accepting and that's the that's the sad that's the sad part that we all just can't accept, and we have to treat everything with love. But it's hard to do for some people.”


Fanning says she'd like to use her platform to encourage others to be themselves in cinema entertainment.


Brut.


avatar
Brut.