MEDIA > ARTICLES & INTERVIEWS > 2005

FANNING USED TO THE BIG LEAGUES
from Sun Times, June 26, 2005
by Cindy Pearlman
NEW YORK -- She doesn't read Variety while eating her Frosted Flakes. The Hollywood Reporter isn't the basis of her latest book report. Hollywood's most important 12-year-old -- the girl who has acted opposite Penn, Washington, De Niro and now Cruise -- insists that she has a very regular life.
"Except it wasn't so regular the other month when I was on a plane and had to see myself in 'Hide and Seek' three different times. I put the airplane blanket on my head and said, 'Oh, no!'" says Dakota Fanning.
Fanning is a veteran at being horrified because she's also running from aliens this summer in the big budget "War of the Worlds." As Tom Cruise's seriously freaked-out daughter, the Steven Spielberg movie required her to cry and scream until she couldn't wring out another tear.
"It's easy to cry for a movie," Fanning says. "I just think about what my character is going through. I become upset if she is upset."
She says it wasn't difficult to pretend to be scared for months on end, especially when she had her screen pop's arms to run into.
"It's not bad when you have Tom Cruise carrying you around," Fanning says. "It started one day when Steven said, 'Tom, I think you should be carrying her.' Every day after that Tom joked to me, 'You feel a little heavier than yesterday.'"
All joking aside, Fanning is becoming quite a Hollywood heavyweight. As for working with Sean Penn in "I Am Sam," Robert De Niro in "Hide and Seek" and Denzel Washington in "Man on Fire," not to mention Cruise and Spielberg, she just shrugs and says, "They're cool guys and just the nicest people."
Fanning lives with her parents in both Georgia and Los Angeles, where she's home-schooled and then works with tutors on sets, the latest being the just-wrapped big-screen "Charlotte's Web" (with the voices of Julia Roberts and Chicago's own Oprah Winfrey). Don't start with the questions about her missing a "normal childhood."
"This is normal for me," she says. "I love what I do."
Fanning's goal is to pull a Jodie Foster and go from child actress to adult star.
"I just love being an actress. I want to do it forever," she says. "Right now, I'm just having fun running from aliens. Who wouldn't want to have that kind of pretend world?"

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