It’s a steamy LA summer’s night and Dakota Fanning is being fed pills by Elvis Presley’s granddaughter, Riley Keough, in a skanky-looking nightclub bathroom. But the teen star is not having a Lindsay Lohan-style breakdown. The fake pill popping is for her next role as Cherie Currie, lead singer of 1970s LA rockers The Runaways – a band most famous for their oversexed teen anthem Cherry Bomb and for their guitarist Joan Jett, who became one of rock’n’roll’s sassiest female icons.
Moments later, Fanning appears and settles on her trailer’s steps, replete with centre-parted 1970s feathered wig, huge-collared polyester shirt, tight polyester flares and gigantic platforms. ‘What do you think?’ she laughs, doing a twirl. ‘This stuff sure takes me back to the
time period.’
Sixteen-year-old Fanning wasn’t even born when cute club-goer Currie was plucked from the same real-life nightclub (Rodney’s English Disco on LA’s Sunset Strip) to be the singer of a band that Jett and local manager/impresario Kim Fowley were putting together. She was no singer, initially anyway. ‘And that helps,’ says Fanning, ‘because I’m not either. Yes, I used to sing into my hairbrush, didn’t we all? But I’ve never ever sung like this before. I took some voice lessons and recorded in a studio for the first time. It was really wild.’
Does she have what it takes in real life? ‘Well I’ll never be a rock star, that’s for sure. But Cherie was so in the public eye when she grew up and, although it was in a very different way to how I’ve grown up, of course I can identify.’
Currie was 15 when she was propelled to stardom. Fanning entered the public eye at an even younger age, via a TV commercial for washing powder filmed when she was six. Even then, the casting team noticed something exceptional about the ice-cool blonde who did exactly what was asked of her as if she were already a pro.
And though detractors might imagine Fanning’s parents as failed actors craving success vicariously, nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, Fanning stood a greater chance of a professional sports career, being the offspring of two sports prodigies (her father played professional baseball, her mother professional tennis). But she was always happiest playing make-believe – though she hates any suggestion that she is, or ever was, precocious.
‘For sure I feel like a teenager,’ says Fanning. ‘I’m not an adult at all. I think I’m mature but it’s hard to really tell.
I don’t think I grew up too fast.’ She admits she started reading at the age of two and skipped kindergarten altogether but also loves nothing better than hanging with her friends, her dog and her horse, and watching Desperate Housewives and Brothers & Sisters. She also likes to knit – she has knitted scarves for Tom Cruise (they worked together in 2005’s War Of The Worlds), Robert De Niro (Hide And Seek, 2005) and Denzel Washington (Man On Fire, 2004).
Is she convinced, at just 16, that acting is her future? ‘I am,’ she says, when we meet again later in an LA hotel. This time she’s wearing a de rigueur fashion-forward LA teenage outfit: dark T-shirt, skinny jeans, towering black heels. ‘I know this is what I want to do for the rest of my life. That’s how I would like it to be but I think that everything can end tomorrow, So I don’t think you ever feel completely secure.’
Though she continues to embrace family-friendly fare, most recently 2009’s wildly inventive, hugely successful Coraline, much has been made of her occasional less-than-childlike acting forays. She had a much-dissected rape scene in 2007’s Hounddog. And in The Runaways, she and Kristen Stewart, who plays Jett, make out. Was this also a lot of fuss over nothing?
‘Of course,’ she smiles, nonplussed. ‘This is a true story. This is what some people go through. I don’t think of it as something that’s so crazy. It’s just the real life of a person.’And besides, she and K-Stew are tight.
By the time they filmed The Runaways they had already starred together in the Twilight film Eclipse (Fanning plays seriously startling Volturi vampire Jane) and will work together again on Breaking Dawn this winter. ‘We’re only doing movies together from now on,’ Fanning deadpans. ‘It’s in our contract.’
The Runaways is in cinemas from Friday.
Subject: Dakota Fanning: Kissing Kristen Stewart wasn't 'crazy' 
Mon Sep 06, 2010 11:36 am