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“I feel life unfolds in the way that it’s supposed to and what’s meant for me will be mine, that’s kind of the way I live my life.”
B ut scroll through TikTok lately and there you’d find her, circa 2003, sassily pronouncing: “Take a look around. Do you see [my mom]
anywhere? News-fa-lash. You’re not gonna.” The clip was plucked from Uptown Girls, a film that follows Fanning’s precocious, self-important Ray and her childlike nanny Molly (Brittany Murphy) on a journey toward joint self-discovery. In the scene, Ray is desperately trying to assert control in
her life. Online, it’s come to represent feeling hangry, answering a misdial, dealing with imposter syndrome and everything in between. “I love seeing the resurgence of [the film] because I talk to my girlfriends that watched it at the age I was when I filmed it and I think it’s a real comfort for a lot of people who are now adults revisiting it and maybe understanding it in a different way,” Fanning tells me.
The actress is video calling from the tranquil living room of her Los Angeles home. The picture is pleasingly monochromatic—she is dressed in soft layers that perfectly meld with her cream couch; her blond hair pulled back. “I have a very serene house,” she says. “People say that when they walk in, and that’s exactly what I was going for.” It seems like the perfect retreat for someone who hasn’t stopped moving since the age of six, when she starred alongside Sean Penn in the 2001 film I Am Sam (she was the youngest person to ever be nominated for a Screen Actors Guild Award for her performance). Over the past three decades, Fanning has shape-shifted into an all-powerful vampire for the Twilight films, a badass punk rocker
in The Runaways, and a dissociative Manson Family member in Once Upon
a Time in Hollywood—all the while morphing from child star to seasoned professional. Having recently turned 30, Fanning has a new perspective. “I’ve been very busy the last few years, so, not that I want to slow down, but I want to make sure that I’m super present in everything, really soak it in, and not try to ever hurry up and get to the next thing,” she says.
Fanning stars in the upcoming Netflix whodunit The Perfect Couple, alongside Nicole Kidman, Liev Schreiber, Eve Hewson, and Meghann Fahy. Directed by Susanne Bier, the series centres around the seemingly charmed lives of one of Nantucket’s wealthiest couples (Kidman and Schreiber), which are upended when a body is found on the day of their son’s wedding.
Fanning plays Abby, the wife of the couple’s other son. She is as pregnant as she is charmingly insufferable (in one scene, she exclaims, “This is vintage!” to stop the brothers from throwing punches in her presence). “I have some horrible things to say and do in this role, but I certainly relished in getting to be outrageous with that character,” she says. “I mean listen, not everyone’s a likeable person, not everyone says the right things at the right times in life.”
The Perfect Couple is as suspenseful as it is fun—each episode inexplicably begins with the cast performing a choreographed dance on the beach, which Fanning says is an ode to the quirkiness of the characters. “I could have watched Liev do it all day,” she says, laughing. Fanning describes filming the series as “idyllic,” with much of her time spent whale-watching
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