Dakota Fanning Gets Candid on Elle, Orlando Bloom & Her Tarantino Full-Circle Moment

Dakota Fanning Is Finally Having Fun With The Whole Story

Young legend Dakota Fanning has enough career memories to fill several podcasts — and Josh Horowitz knows exactly where to start unlocking them.

Fanning returns to Happy Sad Confused for “Dakota Fanning, Vol. II,” a roughly 65-minute conversation that jumps from her newest work to the very specific pieces of Hollywood history that have followed her since childhood.

There is her latest project, Joe Swanberg’s The Sun Never Sets. There is the still-viral 2002 Critics Choice Awards moment when a seven-year-old Dakota was too short for the microphone and presenter Orlando Bloom lifted her up so she could deliver her acceptance speech. There are memories from Twilight, Tom Cruise’s famously persistent birthday-gift tradition and, finally, getting to act opposite sister Elle Fanning.

The Sun Never Sets Let Dakota Throw Out The Rulebook

One of the most revealing parts of the episode is Fanning talking about The Sun Never Sets, the Joe Swanberg film that gave her a very different kind of acting experience. Rather than working from a rigid traditional script, the production used a more improvisational, collaborative approach.

For an actor who has spent most of her life moving through highly structured film sets, that looseness sounds almost radical. Fanning describes the experience as creatively freeing — less about hitting marks that had already been decided and more about trusting instinct, the other actors and whatever happened in the room.

That fits the larger place Fanning seems to be in professionally. The former “child star” label has become less interesting than the choices she is making now, and she speaks like somebody who is increasingly comfortable choosing projects because they feel creatively right rather than because they fit some grand career strategy.

Acting With Elle Finally Turned Childhood Play Into A Real Set

Then there is The Nightingale, the upcoming adaptation that puts Dakota and Elle Fanning opposite one another onscreen for the first time as adult performers. Considering that the sisters grew up acting and playing together, the milestone feels both enormous and weirdly natural.

Dakota describes working with Elle as an extension of something that has existed between them since childhood rather than some suddenly manufactured “sisters on screen” event. Their shared history is already there. The cameras simply caught up.

Orlando Bloom, Tarantino And The Stories That Refuse To Leave

Of course, some memories simply refuse to stay in the archive. The 2002 Critics Choice Awards clip of tiny Dakota being lifted toward the microphone by Orlando Bloom has become one of those internet-era time capsules that keeps resurfacing no matter how many decades pass.

Fanning remembers it with a mix of affection and embarrassment — including the sheer number of people she managed to thank during the speech. She and Bloom still talk about the moment when they see each other, and she even jokes that maybe one day they should recreate it.

The conversation also reaches her long-running Quentin Tarantino connection. Fanning had auditioned for Kill Bill as a child, then years later wrote Tarantino a personal note saying how much she wanted to work with him. That eventually led to an audition — with Tarantino reading scenes opposite her — and her role as Squeaky Fromme in Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood.

It is exactly the kind of full-circle career story this episode does well: a childhood audition that did not work out, an adult actor taking another shot and, years later, finally landing inside the filmmaker’s universe.

Watch Dakota Fanning Return To Happy Sad Confused

The Aug. 24 episode runs about 1 hour 4 minutes and covers The Sun Never Sets, Orlando Bloom, Twilight, Elle Fanning, Tom Cruise, Quentin Tarantino and more.

Sources: Happy Sad Confused; Entertainment Weekly; and contemporaneous coverage of Dakota Fanning’s Quentin Tarantino audition history.