Fanning, one of the new global ambassadors for Clé de Peau Beauté, shares her well-being secrets.

Since the age of six, when she was cast in her first feature film, I Am Sam, Dakota Fanning has been making a place for herself in Hollywood. This spring, the 28-year-old played Betty Ford’s daughter in The First Lady, the Showtime drama series about American White House leadership, and she’ll be seen later this year in crime thriller Ripley, a series about a 1960s grifter. Plus, Japanese beauty brand Clé de Peau Beauté celebrated its 40th anniversary by welcoming the American actor and producer (she launched her production company, Lewellen Pictures, with her sister, Elle, last year) as one of its muses, alongside industry peers Ella Balinska and Diana Silvers. Fanning is also a big fan of Clé de Peau Beauté’s initiative, which has been encouraging young women around the world to pursue studies in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) since 2019.

WHAT DOES COLLABORATING WITH CLÉ DE PEAU BEAUTÉ MEAN TO YOU?

“I really love the brand’s approach to beauty, which is about unlocking the radiance within us all—highlighting each person’s uniqueness and bringing that out with the aid of its luxurious skincare products and makeup. I love that, and the company does so much philanthropic work as well, helping educate young girls around the world. That’s very important to me.”

WHAT IS THE FIRST THING YOU DO WHEN YOU WAKE UP?

“I take a probiotic. Our gut is where it all begins. It’s the foundation of our health and what comes through our skin. I swear by it.”

Dakota Fanning gives a lot of interviews, yet a great deal about her life off-screen remains a mystery. The 28-year-old actor and producer knows it, too. In fact, she embraces it: “I think people are starting to catch on.” She is someone who has lived her entire life in the limelight, winning Critics Choice Awards when most 7-year-olds were busy learning second-grade arithmetic, but Fanning has managed to do what most in her situation have tried and failed to—keep her private life, well, private. “There are [things that people don’t know]—1000%,” she says. Then again, that’s sort of been the point. “I can’t tell [you], because then my mystique is gonna be lost,” she adds.

Even so, Fanning, who is returning to the screen in Showtime’s new series The First Lady, didn’t come off the least bit guarded during our recent Zoom conversation. On the contrary, the actor was as open and relaxed as ever, perched in a bright-white spot in her Los Angeles home and looking every bit the movie star—maybe even ethereal—in a crisp button-down shirt. Her hair was slicked back in a low bun, and her wrist was decorated with a vintage gold watch. “I don’t know if people don’t think I’m fun, but I think I’m a lot less serious than people may assume,” Fanning says, noting how often her own personality is confused with those of the very serious characters she portrays on-screen. “I love to have fun, I love to make people laugh, [and] I don’t take myself too seriously.”

Everything she says is true. In the span of our 80-minute call, Fanning gushes about her dedication to reality television (“I watch all the Real Housewives, always have. I love them,” she says with a passion) as well as her die-hard fandom over Mercedes Formula One driver Lewis Hamilton (“Don’t [even] get me started,” she says). She then goes into story mode about the time her laptop broke on the set of her forthcoming series Ripley in Italy and her ensuing downward spiral. Relatably, Fanning can’t wind down without her favorite not-guilty-to-her TV shows, especially after a long day of shooting. “If I enjoy something, I don’t know why I should feel that guilty about it,” she says. Thus, a quest to find an Apple store anywhere near the Amalfi Coast was underway.

Intensely dedicated to her craft, prone to Bravo binging and self-deprecation, and emanating the kind of confidence only someone who’s truly figured herself out can exude, Fanning isn’t an easy person to sum up. “I’m full of a lot of contradictions,” she says. “And there’s a very, very sweet spot in the middle of these contradictions, and that’s where I live.”

Everyone’s always like, “You’re 12” and I’m like, “No, I’m 27″. People have an image of me that’s seemingly unchangeable regardless of what the truth is.’

For an entire generation of screen-watchers, Dakota Fanning was the fresh-faced child star that dominated Hollywood during the noughties. She stood by Tom Cruise as evil alien robots took over the planet in War Of The Worlds, pouted in prep school uniform in Uptown Girls and evaded kidnappers alongside Denzel Washington in Man On Fire. She even made red contact lenses a legitimate beauty look with her role as Volturi vampire Jane in the Twilight series.

But, that was 20 years ago. Fast forward to 2022 and Fanning hasn’t stepped into adulthood so much as powered boldly through it. With starring roles in The Alienist and The First Lady, an enviable spot as Global Brand Ambassador for Clé de Peau Beauté alongside contemporaries Diana Silvers and Ella Balinska, and her own production company co-founded with sister Elle all under her belt, Dakota Fanning has most definitely left the reductive label of ‘child star’ well behind.

ELLE UK caught up with the short film director, skincare lover and cinematic icon to talk all things ageing on screen, the allure of Michelle Pfeiffer and why we need to rebrand the word ‘beauty’…

Moving forward in 2022, what are you excited for in beauty?

‘I’m definitely excited to have more moments of putting on make-up and getting ready for social events that we haven’t really been able to do, so I’m crossing my fingers for that! But I also want to see more of a focus on individual beauty and uniqueness.

‘Beauty is subjective. I think some of the trends right now make everyone look the same and I want to keep seeing a lot of diversity and different ideals of beauty. Some people feel their most beautiful when they’ve got messy hair and they’re wearing pjs first thing in the morning, and I think that’s great. Other people want the full glam to bring out their beauty and that’s great too. I’m somewhere in between. I’m all about highlighting what you have and bringing out your inner beauty, and then make-up is like the icing on the cake. I like looking natural but a little dewy – you can’t speak about beauty now without using the word dewy! For me it’s more of a smart suit pant than sweatpants…’

“Truth is stranger than fiction. That’s a known thing for a reason,” says Dakota Fanning. We are speaking a few days before the premiere of Last Looks, a series on Quibi that looks at real-life crimes in the fashion industry for which The Alienist star is both narrator and executive producer. (It is also produced by Refinery29.)

The show is made up of 18 episodes, with five(ish)-minute installations dedicated to covering the stories of six women. Subjects range from Anna Delvey, a faux heiress who swindled thousands of dollars from New York’s upper class (while decked out in Celine and Alexander Wang), to Patrizia Reggiani, who went from being called “Lady Gucci” to “Black Widow” after being convicted of arranging to kill her ex-husband and Gucci fashion brand heir, Maurizio Gucci, in 1998. Their stories are told through recreations and by people familiar with each case.

“Even though the shows are quite short, I think that you do get a full picture of who these people are. It’s not a one-dimensional look at each person, you really do get to see all sides,” says Fanning. “I think the show does its best to delve into their psyche and try to understand why they do the things that they do.”

The other stories include the tragic cases of Vicki Morgan, model and the mistress of Alfred S. Bloomingdale, heir to the Bloomingdale’s fortune, who was murdered in 1983; Christa Worthington, a fashion writer who was killed in Cape Cod in 2002; Ruslana Korshunova, a Russian model who died by suicide in 2008 shortly after joining a cult; and Sylvie Cachay, an aspiring fashion designer murdered in 2010.

Below, we speak to Fanning about what led her to join the project, the current fascination with true crime, and the dark underside of fashion.

The TCA panel for The Alienist: Angel of Darkness came right before the two-part season finale on Sunday and even though showrunner Stuart Carolan and stars Daniel Brühl and Dakota Fanning remained tight-lipped on what we could expect for the ending of season 2, they did give us insight in how it was like revisiting these characters in a new story. In particular, Fanning talked about her character Sara and how it reflects the movement of female empowerment.

In the new season, Sara has opened her own detective agency and has employed women who she is mentoring. “In The Alienist, we saw her as the first female to hold a position at the New York Police Department and we saw her wanting more,” said Fanning. “Right away in this new season, we see that… she has opened her own business and is struggling to be taken seriously as a female detective and constantly discovering and rediscovering what it means to be a modern woman 1897, the choices that women were and still are forced to make and the pressures of having a career, family and what that all means. We see her all season grappling with that.”

She added, “We get more female energy this time around and that was important to me and I was really happy to see that.”

Later in the panel, Brühl talked about how the themes of the show reflect the current landscape. “Nowadays it is important to have a political and social conscience and to stand up and do the right thing,” he said.

Fanning talked about how Sara is a disruptor and is unafraid to speak up. “I think we see even more of that power that she has discovered within herself in this new season,” she said. “It’s not always easy to do the right thing and to speak up for those who can’t use their voice. Sara uses her privilege to do that. That’s such a core value of who Sara is. I am very proud to play a character like that and learn to continue to implement that in my real life.”

Carolan speaks to the fact that it was the book that speaks to the current feminist movement and the series is just following its lead. Fanning addresses the themes that are resonating with audiences, pointing out that the books were written in the ’90s. “While the feminist movement is not only something that’s been happening currently, it’s clearly been happening for a long time,” she said. “Shows like this, that are set so long ago, really do help put the current movement we see on the news into a perspective to show the origins of them and that they existed for a long time and that 1897 is not so long ago when you really examine the socio-political aspects of the age. When you examine them today, there’s a lot of similarities.”