Dakota and Elle Fanning, Together at Last: On Growing Up, Finding Love, and Making ‘The Nightingale’

Growing up, when Dakota and Elle Fanning played make believe, both of them knew who was in charge. “I was the top dog no matter what,” says Dakota. “She was the groom, I was the bride. I was Anna Wintour and she was the assistant.” One of their favorite games was inspired by the TLC reality series A Baby Story: Dakota was the mother and Elle was her newborn. The younger Fanning would dive beneath a beanbag while her sister laid on top of it, mimicking labor. Eventually, Elle would emerge, wailing like an infant as Dakota bellowed, “Oh, my baby!”

“That’s like Nathan Fielder,” Elle says now, shaking her head. But she can’t be too embarrassed. “That was the most fun I’ve ever had in my life.”

Any pair of siblings could devise their own A Baby Story game. But most kids don’t have access to prop medical equipment they received snagging a guest spot on ER. Every older sister busts her younger sister for stealing her clothes—but usually not after being tipped off by paparazzi photos. Now 31 and 27, the Fannings have been famous nearly all their lives. Both started acting as children; both had their first kisses on camera.

Yet onscreen and in conversation, the sisters somehow radiate normalcy. Why aren’t they more…. “Fucked up?” says Elle, finishing the question. She leans back in her chair, taking a drag from an imaginary cigarette. “We’re like, ‘We’re so fucked up. You don’t even know the half.’ ” She laughs. But seriously: “Even though we were young in this business, I don’t feel like I missed out on anything. People want us to feel like we missed out. They love that narrative.”

The Fannings have always written their own story. They’ve worked with many of cinema’s great auteurs (Tarantino, Spielberg, and Coppola—both Francis Ford and Sofia). They’ve received Emmy nominations for splashy streaming projects. And yes, they’ve sidestepped the traps that snare many young actors forced to grow up too fast.

Perhaps most remarkably, they’ve also avoided the pitfalls that plagued some of Hollywood’s most famous (and famously feuding) sisters: Joan Fontaine and Olivia de Havilland, Joan and Jackie Collins. When I ask Dakota if she and Elle ever feel competitive, something in her posture tells me she saw this question coming. But her answer is firm: “Zero. We obviously share a lot”—including a stylist and publicist—“but we’re very different. So I don’t even see something that’s right for her as being right for me. I don’t feel competitive. But I know that people probably don’t believe that.”

They’ll buy it more once Elle and Dakota finally make a movie together. After a packed fall, during which Dakota works opposite Sarah Snook in the Peacock limited series All Her Fault while Elle appears in Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value and the sci-fi blockbuster Predator: Badlands, they will produce and star in The Nightingale—their very first time onscreen as costars.

“When we were younger, we wanted to make sure that people saw us differently, and we wanted to give each other space to carve our own path,” says Elle. “But as adults, it’s been very fulfilling to merge.”

Hannah Dakota and Mary Elle Fanning were born on opposite ends of the millennial-Gen Z divide, in 1994 and 1998. The sisters spent their early childhood in Conyers, Georgia, and genetics suggested they’d have promising athletic careers. Their father, Steven, played minor-league ball; their mother, Joy, was a college tennis player and daughter of a former quarterback for the Philadelphia Eagles.

Neither one took to sports, instead embracing an equally cutthroat path—though you wouldn’t know it from little Elle’s first experience on a movie set. She made her big-screen debut in 2001 at the age of two as the younger version of Dakota’s character in I Am Sam. “Elle was just toddling around the set, this little towhead, not a care in the world,” Michelle Pfeiffer, who also starred in the film, remembers. “Their personalities were kind of set in that Elle is a little more free-spirited and Dakota’s slightly more serious.”

Those archetypes seemed to guide their early work. Dakota played children in peril opposite towering leading men like Denzel Washington in Man on Fire and Tom Cruise in War of the Worlds. Elle’s whimsical nature led to fantasy projects like David Fincher’s reverse-aging romance The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Disney’s Maleficent, as the ethereal Princess Aurora to Angelina Jolie’s dark fairy.

These days, the sisters appear more alike. “Did we wear the same outfit? It happens all the time,” asks Elle as she plops down at a table in the center of Chateau Marmont’s lush garden. It’s true: When I speak with each Fanning individually, they’re both fresh-faced and nail-polish-free in a crisp button-down paired with neutral slacks. Both are dressed head to toe in The Row—founded, of course, by another set of sisters—save for Elle’s dainty Loewe bag and Goop trousers.

The differences are there for those who pay attention. Elle’s lacy white bralette is slightly visible; Dakota’s shirt is buttoned nearly to the top. Elle shifts from one subject to another with breathless abandon: “We’ll get into all of it,” she promises—dipping a chip into our guacamole, then apologizing for any chomping that my recording device may detect. Dakota, who wants to talk on a partially obscured sofa in the corner of the Chateau’s lobby, is more reserved. “We should talk about that tomorrow,” she suggests at one point, gently but firmly steering me away from topics she’d rather cover with Elle by her side.

Their demeanors shift when they’re together. Dakota laughs more freely, tilting her head back with joy as they trade childhood memories; around her older sister, Elle’s a little more demure.

A few weeks after our first interviews, I’m Zooming with the sisters to ask a couple follow-up questions. Elle is talking about the time she wore a red Fenty dress to a Rihanna concert. “I swear that she saw me and—”

“Oh, please,” Dakota interrupts. “Savannah, you’ll have to do a follow-up interview with Rihanna” to confirm that, she cracks, an eye roll evident in her voice.

In our first conversation, Elle makes a point of saying that she took her career cues from Dakota. At one time, her sister would have agreed: “She wants to go everywhere I am,” a tiny Dakota says of an even tinier Elle in an aughts-era featurette about the English-dubbed version of Hayao Miyazaki’s My Neighbor Totoro. “She’s a lot like me. Her favorite color’s pink, she wears her hair in pigtails, and she loves to be with me.” Even now, says Elle, “I just want to do everything that she does.” Some celebrities resist acknowledging their familial advantages, but Elle wears hers proudly. “I’m a nepo sister. Of course I got opportunities because people are like, Oh, it’s Dakota Fanning’s sister. We’ll see her audition.”

As an adult, Dakota’s sheepish about how she used to order Elle around. Over Zoom, she brings up a video Elle posted in 2019 of the sisters getting ready for a long-ago Halloween event. Little Elle wants to hang; little Dakota shoos her away, shouting, “Go get your wig back on!”

“I’m being so bossy!” Dakota says now. “And Elle’s so sad and cute, just wanting to hang out.” Even then, the differences between them could be stark. “You’re so tiny”—she’s talking to her sister—“but I felt older inside.” She trails off.

“You’re judging your small self,” Elle tells her softly. “You only wish you weren’t so mean.”

Her attitude, says Dakota during our solo interview, has “changed as I’ve gotten older. I just want her to have everything that she wants. What’s mine is hers, and I feel the same thing back from her. We have that mentality in our family. When something good happens, it’s shared by all of us, because we’ve all helped each other get to where we are.”

Kirsten Dunst, whose bond with the Fannings runs so deep that she jokingly refers to herself as “the third sister,” says this solid foundation has paid off: “They’re so smart—smarter than I was at this age.… But also, they’re real. They understand the bullshit of this industry.” Pfeiffer, who also worked with Elle in the Maleficent sequel, agrees. “I’ve never felt there was anything I could teach these two, ever,” she says. “They’re a lot younger than me, but they feel like peers.”

Elle has another theory for why she’s emerged into adult stardom relatively unscathed. “Dakota was always there to protect me,” she says, her clear blue eyes getting misty. “It’s molded both of us, the responsibility that she’s felt—that I don’t even know that she’s felt.”

I don’t need to look at the menu,” says Elle as she enters Casa Vega, a nearly 70-year-old Mexican restaurant in the San Fernando Valley owned by longtime Fanning family friend Christy Vega. Dakota drove them both there in her navy blue Porsche Macan. Elle also has a driver’s license, but her primary set of wheels is a limited-edition Kate Spade bike with strawberries on the seat. As we settle into a red leather booth, Dakota sits directly in front of a gold plaque that reads “Dakota Fanning.” She’s also got a namesake margarita on the menu—“a huge flex” for Valley girls, she says.

Elle and I both order the Dakota: Jaja Reposado, Cointreau, house-made honey thyme elixir, and fresh lemon juice, topped with an orange salt rim. The actual Dakota gets a beef taco, no lettuce or tomato—almost exactly what she requested at this same restaurant when she was 12, promoting the live-action Charlotte’s Web in the pages of Vanity Fair.

The Fannings have formed a production company called Lewellen Pictures, an ode to their first and only childhood dog. In meetings, they each take on a familiar role: Dakota is more practical, translating Elle’s wild ideas into actionable items. But Elle may be pickier. Dakota takes pride in marrying high- and lowbrow culture: “Put caviar on a McDonald’s chicken nugget, and it’s the greatest thing ever,” she says.

But the sisters are completely aligned on their first film as full-fledged costars: The Nightingale, based on Kristin Hannah’s best-selling novel about French sisters in Nazi-occupied France. “We’ve literally never done a scene together, ever,” Dakota says, as Elle wonders if she’ll be able to get through their first take without breaking: “Am I going to laugh? Better to get it out of your system now.” They’ll produce the project alongside actor turned mega-producer Reese Witherspoon.

The film has been on hold for years. Dakota and Elle were about to head to Budapest for preproduction as the pandemic hit. When it was resurrected, filmmaker Michael Morris, fresh off the fourth Bridget Jones movie, stepped in to replace their original director, French actor Mélanie Laurent. “He has daughters and really seemed to understand the dynamic,” says Dakota.

Hollywood has long been angling to get the Fanning sisters in the same movie—and not as different versions of the same character. They were in talks to colead My Sister’s Keeper, a 2009 tearjerker about a young girl conceived to become a marrow donor for her gravely ill sister, but stepped away from it because Dakota didn’t want to shave her head. (Sofia Vassilieva and Abigail Breslin ended up in the movie.)

Plus, says Dakota, she and Elle acting together at that age “would’ve been gimmicky.” The Fannings waited this long, they say, because they needed a project that would give them equally compelling arcs. The Nightingale follows guarded older sibling Vianne, who urges caution when dealing with the Germans—but later hides Jewish children in her home—and rebellious younger sister Isabelle, who joins the French Resistance and becomes a target of the Nazis. “What I love about it is it’s two women fighting, resisting,” says Elle. “One in a louder way, one in a quiet way.”

Along with The Nightingale, the Fannings are working on a Hulu true crime docuseries out in September. But the number one question they get, according to Elle, is when they’ll make a TV series adaptation of Paris Hilton’s memoir, the rights to which A24 acquired on their behalf in 2023. They’d welcome the opportunity “to weave that outward persona—the glitz, the glam, the Chihuahuas in clothes—with the darker underbellies of Paris’s journey,” says Dakota. She confirms they’ve met with the former socialite at her home to discuss a TV project, “a childhood dream come true.”

Hilton met Dakota while filming a cameo for The Cat in the Hat back in 2003. “Watching her—and Elle—grow into such talented, grounded, and inspiring women has been a full-circle moment,” Hilton writes by email. The Fannings also paid attention to the heiress’s trajectory—making them the ideal fit to adapt her memoir. “They grew up watching my career unfold, so they understand both the cultural impact and the personal journey behind it,” says Hilton. “They see beyond the catchphrases and sparkle.”

While Hilton remains mum on which Fanning will play the Nicky to her Paris, she notes that Elle and Dakota are uniquely qualified to tell their story. “Growing up in the public eye, especially in the middle of peak tabloid culture, was intense in ways you can’t really explain to someone who hasn’t lived it,” says Hilton.

Though Elle and Dakota were largely spared by the tabloids that documented Paris’s and Nicky’s every move, they’re no strangers to the media culture of the 2000s. “Your biggest concern was being the worst dressed in the back of Us magazine,” Dakota says. “We’d always get them at the airport or in the nail salon. I’m nine, flipping [pages] like, ‘Is my outfit on there?’ It was not, most of the time.”

Things only intensified as they got older—though Elle says Dakota had it harder. “Someone was always trying to catch her doing something.” She falters, trying to remember the name of a long-dead website, before it comes to her: “OceanUp! It was like a Perez Hilton for young, like, Disney stars.”

Dakota groans. “OceanUp was brutal. Eventually I told friends of mine, just don’t put any photos on the internet. I have no photos from that time.” She had more than one reason to lay low. “I definitely had my guard up. It wasn’t even really about ‘This will ruin my career.’ I don’t want to get in trouble with my mom.” She laughs. “It wasn’t about the public—it was Joy Fanning.” Elle was a little more inclined to test the waters. Or perhaps, she muses, she just got caught more.

Elle and Dakota remain very close with their mother and grandmother, who live together and recently accompanied the sisters on a rare vacation to Hawaii. But it’s not clear how their father fits into the equation. Joy and Steven separated in 2016. “I don’t think we should go there,” Dakota says with a nervous laugh when I bring up the subject. “It is a longer story that I just don’t think we feel comfortable to share.”

Elle agrees. Then, perhaps eager to cut one of the few moments of tension during our time together, she adds, “It’s on OceanUp.”

Dakota is fine answering questions about her child-star days—really. “Maybe there were moments where I was annoyed by it,” she says, sampling an iced tea back at the Chateau Marmont. “But I would never have shown that to anyone.” She sheds a flip-flop, tucking her bare foot behind her other calf, a blue Hermès bag at her side. “I’ve always compared it to a great-uncle at the family reunion being like, ‘I remember when you were this big.’ It was that all the time.”

Dakota’s breakthrough role in I Am Sam at age six earned her a Screen Actors Guild nomination and a Critics Choice Award. (Orlando Bloom hoisted her up to the microphone to deliver an acceptance speech.)

“When I started, my mom was my age now,” says Dakota. And raising a movie star means confronting some unusual questions: What does one say to Tom Cruise when he asks if your daughter can accompany him on a helicopter ride? How should you dress her for an interview with Jay Leno? The answers, as Joy learned, are “I guess!” and apparently a pair of opaque tights with Mary Janes. Joy was the anti-momager, says Dakota. “She was relying on finding good, trustworthy people. She went with us everywhere but also gave me a lot of space to find my footing.”

From I Am Sam on, Dakota made about two films a year on average—until she graduated from high school in 2011. “In some ways, it’s about what you don’t do,” says Pfeiffer. “They’ve both been incredibly selective. Dakota went away to school at the peak of her career…. Like, who does that?”

Dakota had some growing pains during this time, particularly related to being apart from her mother. She celebrated her last day in California at Disneyland with friends, then felt terribly guilty she wasn’t spending those precious hours with her family.

Dakota will also always feel a little responsible for her younger sister. “It makes her uncomfortable when she feels that I’m out of control,” she says. “But I’ve been responsible and in control of a lot of things for my whole life. Sometimes you have to get me home”—if, for instance, Dakota’s had one too many Dakotas. “She’s super supportive but likes it when I’m together.” Dakota considers that before leaning in and lowering her voice. “I’m always in control, deep down.”

A few times during our conversation, Dakota mentions big emotions—annoyance over being labeled a child star, anxiety in the early weeks of living in New York—and her desire for nobody to know she’s having them. “My mom told me I would not practice tying my shoes in front of her because I didn’t want her to see that I didn’t know how,” she says. “She was like, ‘I couldn’t teach you if you wouldn’t let me. So you didn’t know how to tie your shoes for a long time.’ ” Dakota repeats what has become something of a personal mantra: “I’m not going to let people see me sweat, and you’re not going to get one over on me.” With the steely look in her eyes, I’m inclined to believe it.

Living in New York was a longtime dream for Dakota: “That is what cool older people did. I wanted a loft with brick.” A luxury condo building with neighbors like John Mayer and Tyra Banks isn’t too shabby either. She studied film and women’s studies at New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study, a program designed for people who, say, have to shoot the TNT drama The Alienist in Budapest between term papers. (The Olsen twins went there too.) But Dakota left New York before she could collect her diploma. Her trusted adviser Rahul Hamid died in 2022. “He would be disappointed that I haven’t done the last thing to graduate,” she says, looking down and searching for her next words, “but I think he would understand I don’t want to do it without him.” Dakota often thought of Hamid while making a largely improvised romantic drama with mumblecore filmmaker Joe Swanberg. Hamid introduced her to Swanberg’s work. “Every once in a while, you need an experience like that,” Dakota says. “It revives something in you.”

Since leaving school, Dakota has turned frequently to prestige TV. “I’ve not had the experience of doing six seasons of something,” she says, “but doing a limited series kind of feels like a movie.” Her upcoming slate no longer includes Rodham, a serialized adaptation of Curtis Sittenfeld’s novel that imagines Hillary Clinton’s life had she never married Bill: “I would be totally open if it came together again, but at the moment, no.”

The press has been hailing Dakota’s “first adult role” for some 15 years now—from her edgy turn as Cherie Currie, lead singer of a ’70s teen punk band, in The Runaways all the way up to Ripley, a 2024 eight-episode adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s novel. But her next project marks her first time playing a mother. She can’t personally relate to the haunting premise of All Her Fault—a mom realizes her son is missing after a playdate gone sideways—but she knows she’ll have kids of her own someday. “I have wanted to be a mother since I can remember,” she says. “I will do that no matter what.”

When Elle floats into the Chateau for our solo afternoon chat, a pressing question arises: “Are you the older or younger sister?” she wants to know. Older, by three years. “So you relate to Dakota.” Eager to establish there are no favorites here, I say I’m actually closer in age to her. “Oh, so you’re close to me,” she replies. Satisfied with the answer, we order matching iced oat milk lattes.

“Elle feels like the younger sibling to me,” says Dunst. “She presents herself more unencumbered by things, but I think that’s deceiving. All three of us wear things pretty lightly when we present ourselves to the world, but there’s a depth. They’re very discerning, very intuitive. Nothing gets past those two.”

The younger Fanning is used to being underestimated—much like Catherine the Great, whom she played for three seasons on Hulu’s The Great. “That’s the character most like me,” she says. “People on the outside see her as young, romantic, kind of girlish—but there’s so much more on the inside.” Elle has always beat her own drum, particularly when it comes to fashion. When her classmates wore tight Hervé Léger dresses to bar mitzvahs, “I was in crazy Rodarte pants that people didn’t understand,” says Elle. “But I was like, I get it.”

Her singular tastes led Elle to producing and starring as disgraced Gleek Michelle Carter in the limited series The Girl From Plainville, making her Broadway debut opposite Sarah Paulson in Appropriate, and returning to film with last year’s A Complete Unknown as the soulful girlfriend of Timothée Chalamet’s enigmatic Bob Dylan—her first movie since 2020. “You almost feel you’re reintroducing yourself to the world,” Elle says, folding her black straw into smaller sections. “I was in Timmy’s trailer, like, I’m nervous. He’s like, I’m nervous. Oh yeah, you’re playing Bob Dylan.”

She’s more comfortable at the Chateau Marmont, the Hollywood institution where she shot Somewhere—her first movie with Sofia Coppola. Elle was 11 at the time, drawing raves for her performance as the daughter of Stephen Dorff’s aimless film star.

Her latest movie is also about fathers who make films. In Sentimental Value, Norwegian filmmaker Joachim Trier’s searing follow-up to The Worst Person in the World, Elle plays an American actor drawn into family drama when Stellan Skarsgård’s Gustav casts her to play his daughter in a movie—a role his actual daughter, Nora (Renate Reinsve), refuses to take. Elle didn’t want her character, Rachel, to be “the cliché, bratty, snotty kind of Hollywood star. I wanted to make her curious and brave.” The part wasn’t a giant leap for her. “I’ve had movies that didn’t work out the way you wanted to. But you always realize why you did them.”

She balanced duties on that project with her role in Predator: Badlands, the next chapter in the franchise from director Dan Trachtenberg. “The script had so much heart, which is wild for a Predator film,” says Elle. And she couldn’t pass up the chance to play mysterious dual roles: “I did get to live out The Parent Trap fantasy of acting with yourself.”

Next year brings Margo’s Got Money Troubles, starring Elle as a cash-strapped young mother who starts an OnlyFans. She raises her eyebrow: “As we’ve all thought about.” Then comes The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping, in which Elle takes over the role of Effie Trinket from Elizabeth Banks. “Effie’s the best character, but I do feel pressure. That’s like playing Bob Dylan.” Would she ever make her own film? “I can direct Dakota,” Elle says, thinking back to her days as second banana in the playroom. “Finally, comeuppance!”

Before we leave the Chateau, I mention Dakota’s theory that Elle is unnerved when her older sister asks for help. “She enjoys getting a rise out of me,” says Elle, though she admits “the first time that she called me for advice, it was like the sun had just come down on me.… Now we talk about everything. She knows all my secrets and I know all of hers. I relish the fact that I can protect her because she needs protection too.” Underneath that tough exterior, “she has a very delicate heart.”

Back at Casa Vega, Dakota urges her little sister to scoot forward so she can spoon some esquites onto her waiting plate. Then the real dishing can begin. For two years Elle has been dating Rolling Stone executive chairman Gus Wenner, and she doesn’t care who knows it. “If your partner doesn’t post you on Instagram, that’s a red flag. I love my boyfriend, and we’re going to post each other,” she told me the day prior. “I’m so happy. And Dakota loves him. That’s the seal of approval.”

Elle was in Paris when her sister and her boyfriend first met, accidentally bumping into each other in Las Vegas. “We were newly dating, and I really cared about him,” Elle says. “They were at the same after-party—she turned around, and there he was. Then they had this whole night of gambling. Dakota was with all of her girlfriends, and I’m getting sent videos. She’s dancing with Gus.” Dakota was happy to bond with Wenner. “But I used some stern words. Just warnings, cautions said with a smile.… It went great. He’s the brother I never had.”

Elle aims similar protective energy at any man in Dakota’s life. “I actually screamed at someone for her. I didn’t throw a drink, but I did knock it over and accidentally spilled on the guy,” she says. Dakota is currently single: “I’ve had some doozies lately! But one day….” Elle chimes in with a huff. “These guys. What is wrong with them? How dare they!”

I ask if either of them has dabbled in the invite-only dating app Raya. They exchange a look. “She has never done this. Ever,” says Elle. “And then the other day—”

“I did it for fun,” Dakota interjects. “My girlfriend made it for me.… I was like, if I don’t, then I’m going to think—”

“Maybe my husband is there,” Elle finishes for her.

“I can confirm that he is not,” says Dakota.

Elle urges Dakota to show us her Raya anyway. “I haven’t seen a ton of familiar faces yet,” Dakota says, scrolling through a few suitors. Elle notes, correctly, that they all look exactly the same. Then Dakota reveals why she really made her profile: “Guess what my song is.”

“You already told me,” says Elle. It’s “Salt Shaker,” the biggest hit from early-aughts hip-hop group the Ying Yang Twins. Dakota sighs. “I’m canceling this thing.”

Long after our Dakotas have been emptied, I ask the Fannings what this moment means to them. For Elle, it brings to mind a Donna Lewis song released in the four-year gap between their births: “I love you, always forever / Near and far, closer together / Everywhere, I will be with you /Everything, I will do for you.”

“When I hear that song, I always think of us,” says Elle, her voice breaking. Dakota reaches an arm across the table. Elle starts to cry, then laughs. “I am on my period,” she says, sending us all into hysterics. “And we talked about when I first got my period yesterday too!” (She was 14 and first felt the cramps at a Chanel fashion show in Paris. “Not relatable,” she said then with a laugh and a shrug.)

Perhaps to make her little sister feel less alone, Dakota launches into her own story. “This wasn’t my first period, but it was early days.” Dakota was attending the 2009 NAACP Awards with her castmates from The Secret Life of Bees. “I was in a nude chiffon kind of babydoll dress that I think was BCBG.… We got home, and Mom goes, ‘What is on…. Oh. Dakota….’ It’s covered. Now, I’ve never seen any photographs—”

“OceanUp,” Elle and I say in unison.

Then it’s Dakota’s turn to get mushy. Because of Elle, “I’m able to have confidence and security in my life,” she says. “If I lost every friend I have on the planet—”

“The extremes!” Elle shouts, dabbing her eyes with a cloth napkin.

“I’m just saying,” Dakota continues. “If everyone in my life stopped talking to me, I’d be devastated. But if I still had my sister, I’d be like, ‘Well, I have her.’ ”

Sittings Editor: Dara Allen. Hair, Orlando Pita; Makeup, Fulvia Farolfi; Manicures, Deborah Lippmann; Tailor, Aneta V. Produced on location by Portfolio One. For details, go to VF.com/credits.