The actor, who has been working since she was two, taps into new powers on two TV shows: season two of The Great and limited series The Girl From Plainville.

In both The Girl From Plainville and The Great, there are moments when a close-up of Elle Fanning’s face takes up the entire frame, her blue eyes staring directly into the camera, emotion rippling through her face as her character comes to a shocking realization. In season two of The Great, it’s when Catherine discovers that her husband, Peter, slept with her mother and then accidentally killed her. In Plainville, it’s when her character, Michelle Carter, is convicted of involuntary manslaughter for using text messages to pressure her boyfriend to commit suicide.

“Now that I’m thinking about it, cameras are always really, really close to my face,” says Fanning with a laugh during our conversation for Little Gold Men. “You kind of have to drown everything out when you’re doing those scenes…. You have to put on blinders, and you’re just like in this trance with the camera. I kind of enjoy those moments.”

It’s not just those brief moments that depend wholly on Fanning—both series only work, and work well, because of the performances that Fanning is able to deliver as the lead. “I think they mark a really special moment in my career,” says the 24-year-old actor, who has been working since two years old, first playing the younger version of her sister Dakota Fanning’s characters in the film I Am Sam and the miniseries Taken. “In child acting, those roles are designed to be observant. I was very conscious of that when I was younger, and I was kind of envious of the other actors that I would work with because they’re getting to be wild and experiment…. These two roles have allowed me to get to take action in a real way—and take action in my career.”

Fanning’s notable career mostly revolved around film as she grew up, but since signing on to The Great, TV has become the priority. Though that means she has less time to shoot movies, it’s a sacrifice she’s happy to make for what felt like a unique opportunity, even if it was for the small (streaming) screen. “I feel like these shows have given me a challenge that no movies that I’ve come across lately have held,” she says. “These characters couldn’t be better in the sense of challenging me.”

In The Great, Fanning plays an outlandish version of the famous Russian ruler Catherine the Great, who overthrows her husband (played by Nicholas Hoult) to rule Russia and attempt to bring it into a new era of education and enlightenment. Through most of the second season, which hit Hulu in November, her character is pregnant, forced to rule a nation while also keeping her troublesome husband in line and dealing with odd pregnancy cravings for dirt and rusty nails. “With Catherine, I felt like my acting muscle—wherever that is or whatever that is or how stupid it sounds—it really grew and I became less embarrassed,” she says. “I really had become a little bit more uninhibited.”

Some new photos of Elle Fanning have been added to the gallery so, you can go there to take a look and enjoy!

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Elle Fanning attends the Los Angeles special screening of “The Girl From Plainville” at Television Academy’s Wolf Theatre at the Saban Media Center on April 28, 2022 in North Hollywood. You can go to the gallery to take a look and enjoy the photos!

If you like the updates and want to help this site to keep online, please, feel free to go here to donate. Things are not good and I really need help to keep the site. Every little bit helps!

Elle Fanning has grown up on screen, starring in dozens of movies since her film debut two decades ago. Starting in 2020, she’s gained acclaim as Empress Catherine II in Hulu comedy “The Great.” But two weeks after wrapping production on Season 3, she dove into a much more serious project, Hulu’s “The Girl From Plainville,” playing another real person: Michelle Carter, the teen who was convicted of involuntary manslaughter for encouraging her boyfriend, Conrad Roy III, to end his life.

The case played out in the media when Carter was indicted in 2015. Fanning is also a producer on the eight-part series, now streaming, which takes a deep dive into the relationship between Carter and Roy (portrayed by Colton Ryan) — the side of the story that didn’t make any headlines.

I remember watching the case. I was 19. The media painted this situation in a very one-dimensional way: She was the black widow — a manipulative young woman — and he was the victim, which he very much [was], but we didn’t get to know him. We didn’t get to know Conrad or his backstory or see the amazing man he was. When they came to me to possibly do this and be a producer, I was hesitant because [most of] these people are alive and this is a story that is very sensitive, and I really had to think hard if it was the right thing to do. Ultimately, I decided to do it because the people involved are people that I knew cared about it that way. I felt that we could tell this story in an unbiased way, in a very modern world about something that is very modern: technology and how to navigate that and the false intimacy that it creates for everyone, which I certainly have experienced.

What steps did you take to embody Michelle Carter?

I watched a lot of “Glee.” She was a huge “Glee” fan. I had seen the show, but I watched a lot of it on set. Reading the pilot, in the last scene she’s singing “Make You Feel My Love,” mimicking [“Glee” star] Lea Michele’s grief. Lea’s grief was real in the show; she’s also mourning her real-life boyfriend [Cory Monteith, who died in 2013]. I’ve never met her, but I know every mannerism that she does in that scene. I have a legal pad of notes. I wrote down every time she blinked, every time she moved her hand with each word, to mimic the emotion. It was a real exercise. I felt really connected to her, because I feel like I’ve seen her grieve. It was very meta.

James asks Elle Fanning to recap her epic birthday weekend, and Miami resident Anthony Ramos offers his local recommendations. Then, Elle reminisces about how her acting career affected her prom night.

Melissa McCarthy, Savannah Guthrie, Hoda Kotb and Tamron Hall are among the high-profile women being honored by the 2022 Gracie Awards.

The 47th annual event, presented by the Alliance for Women in Media Foundation, will honor talented women in TV, radio and digital media.

Additional honorees include Kelly Clarkson, Elle Fanning, Kaitlyn Dever, Ellen K, Angie Martinez and Dana Cortez. This year’s awards will also recognize entertainment and news programming that highlighted female-driven stories and culturally relevant topics including 48 Hours, 60 Minutes, NBC Nightly News, The New York Times Presents, Pose and Maid.

“Throughout this past year we have seen a number of remarkable projects by and about inspirational women. We are honored to shine a spotlight on these women, whose stories have driven cultural awareness, offered entertainment that has made us laugh, cry and everything in between,” Alliance for Women in Media Foundation president Becky Brooks said in a statement. “This year, we will be returning to the Beverly Wilshire Hotel and are delighted to return to an in-person format so that we can properly celebrate together.”

The 47th Annual Gracie Awards are set to take on May 24, 2022 in Los Angeles. Local and student award winners will be honored at the Gracie Awards Luncheon on June 22 in New York City. [Source]

I have added a new photoshoot of Elle Fanning to the gallery so, you can go there to take a look and enjoy the photos!

From her early years of child stardom to her current status as a leading lady, ELLE FANNING has achieved more than many actors twice her age. She has flexed comedic muscles as an empress in The Great – which garnered her two Golden Globe nominations – launched a production company with her sister Dakota, and is now stepping into the role of a convicted criminal. Here, the actor talks to MARTHA HAYES about defying expectations and why she’s cautious of the pernicious power of social media

Elle Fanning is reminiscing about the mid-2000s, when she and her older sister Dakota would get mobbed walking around Universal Studios in Hollywood. “If one person saw Dakota [then a child star known for her roles in Uptown Girls and Charlotte’s Web], it was a spiral effect,” she shares over lunch at a Los Angeles deli close to her home in the Valley.

“I wasn’t getting recognized, but I was part of the madness. I’d be like, ‘Dakota! Dakota!’ to try and make it happen.” She rolls her eyes, visibly cringing at her seven-year-old self. “I was the worst.”

By the time she was 12, Fanning – who made her screen debut aged two playing a younger version of Dakota’s character in I Am Sam (2001) – had a dedicated fan base of her own, following her breakout roles in Sofia Coppola’s Somewhere and J.J. Abrams’ sci-fi smash hit Super 8. In the past decade, she has gone on to cultivate a career many veteran actors only dream about, starring in multi-million-dollar blockbusters (such as Maleficent and its sequel) and working with respected art-house auteurs, such as Nicolas Winding Refn in psychological horror The Neon Demon.

Now Fanning is turning 25, it would be clichéd to call this stage of her career a ‘coming of age’ – nevertheless, she has certainly hit a new era. She can now play a mother; she can still play a schoolgirl. And this year she is doing both. The former is, of course, the role of Catherine, the 18th-century Empress of Russia in satirical drama The Great, which has been confirmed for a third series and for which she was nominated for a Golden Globe. The latter is the lead in the true-crime drama The Girl from Plainville.

“You do feel a weight of responsibility because these are real people that we’re talking about,” Elle Fanning tells PEOPLE about her role in The Girl from Plainville

Elle Fanning and Colton Ryan are opening up about their roles in the new Hulu series The Girl From Plainville, which was inspired by real-life events surrounding the relationship between Michelle Carter and her late former boyfriend, Conrad Roy.

Fanning, 23, said the case “could have only happened” due to the current era of technology, telling PEOPLE (the TV show!)’s senior correspondent Jeremy Parsons about how she related to her character through her own personal experiences as a young teenager.

“That was the entry point for me that I could really understand because I was in high school, having social media, texting and feeling those feelings that we all feel of false intimacy and that adrenaline rush that we feel when you get a text from a crush,” she explained, adding that she hopes the show will help “destigmatizing mental health.”

Michelle, an emotionally struggling 17-year-old who portrayed herself as Conrad’s girlfriend, urged him toward his death. Conrad was found dead from carbon monoxide poisoning in his pickup truck on July 13, 2014, in the parking lot of a Kmart in Fairhaven, Massachusetts.

A controversial charge put Michelle on trial for involuntary manslaughter. Prosecutors said she not only researched plans for Conrad’s suicide but pushed him to go through with it when he wavered. She was convicted in 2017 and sent to prison, where she served 11 months.

Elle Fanning is playing Michelle Carter in ‘The Girl from Plainville,’ which takes on the true-crime texting suicide case that shocked the nation. In a new interview with ‘Extra’s’ Jenn Lahmers, Elle opens up about how she prepared for the role and why she didn’t meet with the real Michelle Carter.