Having made her movie debut aged seven, 30-year-old DAKOTA FANNING is savoring her expanding career as much as ever: “If you can still find the light in moments that are tough, then you’re still enjoying it!” Here, the actor and producer talks to MARTHA HAYES about starring in the highly anticipated TV series Ripley, finding a new sense of contentment, and what she really wants from life beyond Hollywood

Dakota Fanning is sipping on a glass of wine and scrolling through photos from her 30th-birthday celebrations four days earlier. “I’ve never had a party like it. I’ve had dinners, but this was… a party,” laughs Fanning, who took over the whole of hip Beverly Hills restaurant La Dolce Vita, hired an ice sculpture of legs “for fun”, and wore a red satin corseted Dolce&Gabbana dress.

“I was destroyed on Saturday – from the biggest hangover I’ve had in years,” she grins, today wearing a black oversized coat by The Row, as we meet at a whiskey tavern close to her house in LA’s Toluca Lake. “But I was icing my head with a huge smile. The past few days, I have felt so light.”

“I wouldn’t say I’m not a happy person, but I do think the late twenties fuck with you,” continues Fanning. “I feel happier and more conscious of what I have, rather than what I don’t have. I know who I am, and the people who know me know who I am, and that’s really all that matters. But there is something about saying that at 30 that feels different to saying it at 28.”

When you’ve been working in Hollywood as long as Fanning – who made her movie debut aged seven in I Am Sam (2001), opposite Sean Penn and Michelle Pfeiffer (becoming the youngest person in history to be nominated for a Screen Actors Guild Award) – it’s no wonder she’s ready to reflect as she gears up for her next chapter. She has worked consistently, morphing from the charming child star of movies such as War of The Worlds (2005) and Charlotte’s Web (2006) to a self-assured twentysomething in grittier projects that include American Pastoral (2016) and The Alienist (2018). She came of age in the middle, appearing in the vampire Twilight franchise (2009 and 2012).
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In 1999’s The Talented Mr Ripley, Gwyneth Paltrow’s Marge Sherwood is, in many ways, the eyes of the audience – sweet and somewhat naive, she welcomes Tom Ripley (Matt Damon) into the idyllic life she’s built with her boyfriend Dickie Greenleaf (Jude Law) in ’50s southern Italy, before the former secretly murders the latter, adopts his identity and sets off on a grand tour on his dime. When she later catches up with him, she’s deeply suspicious, but there’s still a certain fragility to her – desperate though she is to bring him to justice, she knows there’s little she can actually do.

Now in Ripley, Steven Zaillian’s icy, eight-part Netflix retelling of Patricia Highsmith’s 1955 classic – the latest in a long line of adaptations for stage and screen – Dakota Fanning is inheriting that part from Paltrow. She still, at times, acts as the viewer’s eyes and ears, but that is where the resemblance ends. This new iteration of Marge is, in a sense, the antithesis of Paltrow’s sunny, floral-midi-skirt-clad hostess – dressed in trousers and oversized white shirts (and filmed in an atmospheric black and white, as opposed to the original film’s ravishing pastels), she’s steely, watchful and shrewd, someone who seems to recognise Tom (Andrew Scott) for the opportunist he is from the get go.
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She’s also unapologetically ambitious, penning a book on Atrani, the sleepy Amalfi Coast town where she and Dickie (Johnny Flynn) have ended up. While her affluent boyfriend spends his days parading around his palatial villa, she takes photographs and edits drafts in a charming but ramshackle one-room apartment, filled with knitting supplies, wild flowers and candid snapshots. It’s clear that she doesn’t come from money or, at least, from as much money as Dickie does, and isn’t from his crowd of New York sophisticates – we hear she’s from Minnesota and, at one point, she resents being seen as “a small town hick”. The picture we get of Marge in these scenes – someone who is spiky, slippery and frequently unreadable – is so much richer and more complex than anything we’ve been afforded before.

It’s a remarkable performance from Fanning – still, impassive, cold and cryptic – which ranks among the 30-year-old actor’s best. And that’s really saying something: she’s been working for almost two and a half decades, having started out as a child actor, playing a younger version of Calista Flockhart in Ally McBeal, a baby-faced Reese Witherspoon in Sweet Home Alabama, the exuberant lead in Charlotte’s Web, and Tom Cruise’s daughter in War of the Worlds. With I Am Sam, she became the youngest SAG nominee in history aged seven and scooped a Critics’ Choice Award, giving a shockingly articulate acceptance speech as she was lifted up to the microphone by Orlando Bloom.
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I have added some new photos of Dakota Fanning to the gallery so, you can go there to take a look and enjoy!

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Paramount Pictures has boarded the new horror film “Vicious,” led by Dakota Fanning and directed by Bryan Bertino.

Fanning will star as a young woman who is left a strange present by a late-night visitor, and quickly realizes she is fighting for her life after slipping down a disturbing rabbit hole contained inside the gift.

The studio has dated the film for an Aug. 8, 2025, release. Bertino previously directed “The Dark and the Wicked” as well as the sleeper genre hit “The Strangers.” Atlas Entertainment and Richard Suckle (“American Hustle,” “Wonder Woman,” “Suicide Squad”) are producing. Melinda Whitaker will executive produce.

The project is one of several in the pipeline for Fanning, who will next be seen in Netflix’s “Ripley” alongside Andrew Scott from creator Steven Zallian She’ll also turn up in the supernatural thriller “The Watchers” from Ishana Night Shyamalan at New Line, and just wrapped production on Nicole Kidman’s “The Perfect Couple” at Netflix.

The youngest person to ever nab a Screen Actors Guild Award nomination, Fanning and her sister Elle formed Lewellen Pictures in 2020 to develop feature film, television and digital projects. Lewellen is currently in production on the four-part documentary series “Mastermind” for Hulu, which chronicles the experience of the legendary Dr. Ann Burgess and her trajectory from nurse to criminal profiler for the FBI.

Lewellen is also teaming up with A24 to adapt Paris Hilton’s recently published book “Paris: The Memoir” as a TV series, and to produce “Margo’s Got Money Troubles,” which will star Elle Fanning and Kidman for Apple Studios. [Source]