October 01, 2024

By Gracie Hadland

Photo: Olivia Malone

Dakota Fanning is aware of her reputation as the good girl, the sophisticated professional, the child star with a big grin and a precocious attitude. For many of us millennials, she has grown up right along with us: Her career began in the early aughts, when she was 5 years old. She started out playing the “mature youngster” type, first in I Am Sam opposite Sean Penn, for which, at the age of 7, she was the youngest person ever to be nominated for a Screen Actors Guild Award. She followed up by playing the bratty, fastidious Ray in Uptown Girls alongside Brittany Murphy, snagged a lead role in Man on Fire with Denzel Washington, and later appeared in The Runaways as a teen version of the rocker Cherie Currie and as a teen vampire in the Twilight series. But despite being known from such a young age in the splashy aughts tabloid era, Fanning managed to keep her personal life mostly private and maintains that she has always just been focused on the work. Now 30, she’s ready to reveal new sides of herself. “My kink is taking people by surprise and doing things that they don’t expect me to do,” she says.

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Photo-Illustration: by The Cut; Photo: Getty Images

By Madame Clairevoyant

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First and perhaps most important, there's a trailer for Babygirl, so stop everything and watch that. Also, next year, four astronauts will travel the farthest distance humans have ever gone from Earth. Here's how they're prepping. A beauty product’s promises are only as good as the tests that back them up, but you can take those claims with a grain of salt. Media reporter Taylor Lorenz is leaving the Washington Post for greener ($) pastures (Substack). Mexico officially has its first female president in over 200 years of independence. Riley Keough did both Prince and her grandad proud with her performance at Chanel's Paris Fashion Week show. And it's nothing you haven't heard before, but a reminder doesn't hurt: 31 ways to get your shit together, according to GQ.

A biweekly newsletter interrogating modern family life, written by Kathryn Jezer-Morton.