Elle raiser!

At the tender age of 22, Elle Fanning is already a seasoned Hollywood pro. This month she stars as Catherine the Great in television’s most hotly anticipated new drama

- SOPHIE HEAWOOD

I meet Elle Fanning in a London hotel restaurant, where she jumps up to hug me the minute I arrive. It’s noon on Sunday, “so should we order breakfast or lunch?” she asks the waiter, who is just as uncertain. He says she probably knows the menu better than he does by now, given that she’s been living here for six months while filming Stan’s upcoming show The Great, about Catherine the Great. I tell her I want this interview to be a natural conversation rather than a recitation of a list of questions. “Oh good,” she says, her blonde hair falling onto the straps of her baby-doll petticoat dress, a smudge of last night’s mascara under one eye. “Interviews terrify me! No matter how comfortable you feel or how lovely the person, it’s still like, what I say is gonna be out there forever.”