14 DAY TRIAL // Dakota and Elle Fanning may have a certain eerie and, at the same time, ethereal quality about them, but they're also the two most talented sisters now working. In the latest issue of W magazine, the two open the door to their apparently enchanted life.
As it turns out, the two girls (Elle is 13 and Dakota is 17) actually strive to be as “normal” as possible, even though their lives is anything but.
Dakota is going to college now, which means Elle has temporarily lost her older sister and, at the same time, her best friend and the person whose closet she raided occasionally.
“She is a nice older sister. But it’s not like we always get along,” Elle says of Dakota.
“Now that she’s going to college, it’s different. I went into her room at home in California, and all her clothes were gone! Her closet was empty! I don’t get to go in there and steal clothes anymore. It’s really strange. It’s sort of like she’s off making a movie, but this time she’s not coming back,” she says.
Dakota says that, while she's keeping very busy with countless projects, she still wants to get a proper education, which is why she decided to go to college.
She's now sharing an apartment with her mother, but is looking forward to the day when she can buy her own house in LA and perhaps live again with her younger sibling.
“For the same reasons I wanted to go to a high school: You hear people say, 'Oh, when I was in high school' or 'When I was in college.' That defines a lot of who people are, and I didn’t want to miss out on that,” Dakota says of going to college.
One thing is certain: both girls love acting and both got their start when they were very young – too young to know that it was a “serious” job.
Elle, for instance, was cast as a Cate Blanchett in “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” when she was 9. She says she had a lot of “fun” on set, but mostly because she didn't really know what was going on.
Dakota, on the other hand, recalls a time when people didn't want to cast her because she didn't have long hair. Once she grew it out, she was doing improv with Sean Penn at the tender age of 6.
“I usually wouldn’t get things because of my hair. I had really short, wispy hair, and the girls with perfect long, straight hair with bangs and a butterfly clip would always get picked. Finally, I got some more hair and started getting roles,” the star says.
For more on the two girls' interview with W, see here.
