Drama helps Fanning shed child-star status
Elle Fanning says playing the author of the Gothic horror classic Frankenstein in drama Mary Shelley changed her.
“After filming this movie, I felt older, like . . . I felt wiser, like I’d learned something,” said Fanning, 19, just hours before the film, written and directed by Haifaa Al-Mansour ( Wadjda), had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival Saturday.
“I do feel after filming, I started a new chapter in my life, of knowing what it is to be a woman, maybe, realizing that gift,” Fanning added. “Mary Shelley kind of gave me that gift of maturity.”
Shelley was inspired by the writings of her late mother, 18th-century feminist author Mary Wollstonecraft, to similarly live “an unconventional life.” Scandalous to many at the time, Mary was determined to follow her heart.
At age 16, she became the lover of married 21-year-old poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (played by English actor Douglas Booth).
Two years later, a writing challenge proposed by poet Lord Byron (Tom Sturridge) during a dissolute summer at his Swiss estate led Mary to write her story about a tormented manmade creature who feels rejected by the scientist who made him.
The film explores how Mary’s heartbreak and turmoil inspired her story, which was published as Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. Fanning said it was “hard to wrap my head around” during filming, playing a character who was the same age as her yet who “has experienced so much life . . . it seems kind of astounding.”
Not many people are aware of Shelley’s “extraordinary” story, Fanning explained, adding “she felt like she was the monster in the book.”
Fanning is an open, cheerful young woman, prone to giggles, yet thoughtful in her responses. She has admirably kept some traces of the 12-year-old kid she was when I first met her when she was promoting Somewhere, directed by Sofia Coppola, a filmmaker she would work with again on The Beguiled, which opened earlier this year.
With Mary Shelley, she’s taking on her first fully adult role onscreen.
An actor since age 3 when she played a younger version of then 7-year-old sister Dakota Fanning in I Am Sam, she said she sees parallels between herself and Mary. Both of them found their passion and vocation as young children; the film opens with a younger Mary writing stories in a graveyard.
Like Mary, “I grew up and was around adults and I did kind of grow up fast,” Fanning said.
She turns 20 in April and, while it is a significant birthday, she hasn’t given it much thought, she said. She’s content to be where she is and in no hurry to get older.
“It’s strange not being a teenager anymore,” Fanning said. “Am I an adult? There is this sort of middle ground that everybody experiences of not knowing what you are.”