It’s the eve of the release of the next “Predator” movie — Dan Trachtenberg’s “Predator: Badlands,” a follow-up the director’s widely beloved 2022 installment “Prey” and his 2025 animated take “Predator: Killer of Killers” — and you might be wondering where you’ve seen one of the film’s stars before. Specifically, where have you seen the actress who plays both Thia and Thia’s synthetic (and evil) sister Tessa, the latter of whom is hunting Thia in order to permanently destroy her?
The actress in question, Elle Fanning — sister of Dakota Fanning, who’s recently starred in projects like “All Her Fault” and the horror movie “Vicious” — has been working steadily since she was a child, and now, she’s starring alongside Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi, who plays Thia’s unexpected ally Dek, in “Predator: Badlands” (a member of the Predator race who’s shunned for being the runt of his family).
You’ve probably seen the younger Fanning on both the big and small screen in quite a wide variety of projects, and the truth is that Fanning is an incredibly versatile and talented actress who clearly takes after her equally successful older sister. From Oscar-nominated biopics to irreverent historical epics to Disney villain origin stories, here’s where you’ve seen Elle Fanning before “Predator: Badlands.”
Elle Fanning led one of Hulu’s best original shows for three years and three seasons
Like Dakota Fanning, Elle Fanning has been working since she was a little kid — she even played the younger version of Dakota’s main character in Sean Penn’s 2001 film “I Am Sam” — and one year later, she started popping up in small one-off roles on big TV shows like “Taken,” “CSI: Miami,” “House M.D.,” and “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.” (Fans of the latter might remember Fanning’s very prominent role in the infamously messed-up Season 8 episode “Caged.”) We’ll return to Fanning’s big screen exploits in just a moment, but that’s where she spent most of her time until 2020, when her biggest TV role came courtesy of Tony McNamara’s Hulu original series “The Great.”
McNamara, who’s also written similarly off-beat and wonderfully anachronistic portraits of real historical royals like Yorgos Lanthimos’ 2018 film “The Favourite,” pioneered this show that casts Fanning as Empress Catherine the Great of Russia. (As a reminder, Catherine the Great was a ruler who organized a coup against her idiot husband and ended up becoming one of Russia’s most beloved and famous rulers by ushering in a long age of propserity and artistic prowess.) That idiot husband, Emperor Peter III, is played brilliantly by Nicholas Hoult on the series, and Fanning is absolutely sublime as Catherine, an incredibly intelligent and shrewd politician who teams up with her handmaiden and closest friend Marial Brezhnev (Phoebe Fox) and other supporters to steal the throne from her own spouse.
“The Great” ran for three seasons from 2020 to 2023, and in 2022, she also found time to star in the true crime miniseries “The Girl From Plainville.” The big screen, though, is where Fanning shines most reliably.
On the big screen, Elle Fanning has appeared in critically acclaimed and Oscar-nominated movies
After “I Am Sam” in 2001, Elle Fanning went on to appear in a ton of films at a young age, including “Daddy Daycare” in 2003, the English voice dub of “My Neighbor Totoro” in 2005, and “Babel” in 2006. A few years after that, Fanning made an appearance in “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” working with director David Fincher and luminaries like Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett, and in 2010, she starred alongside Stephen Dorff in Sofia Coppola’s emotional father-daughter film “Somewhere,” marking her first role in a more “adult” project that allowed her to show off her growth as an actress.
In 2014, Fanning took a prominent role in “Maleficent,” the Disney villain origin story where Angelina Jolie plays the titular Maleficent to Fanning’s Princess Aurora; the two reunited for the sequel “Maleficent: Mistress of Evil” in 2019. This is also the era where Fanning started taking ambitious and diverse roles in smaller independent projects like “20th Century Women,” “The Neon Demon,” and Sofia Coppola’s striking feminist Civil War film “The Beguiled,” but in 2024, she finally found her way into a smash hit thanks to “A Complete Unknown.”
James Mangold’s biopic of Bob Dylan early in his career cast Timothée Chalamet as the world-famous singer and Fanning as his lover Sylvie Russo, a character based on Dylan’s real-life girlfriend Suze Rotolo. Fanning didn’t earn an Oscar nod like Chalamet did, but she did wow audiences with her sensitive, emotionally resonant, and layered performance as a woman who realizes that fame and temptation will always keep her and her partner apart, proving that she’s handily made the transition from child actor to adult star.
As for “Predator: Badlands,” Fanning’s newest big project, it hits theaters on November 7.