Elle Fanning had decided that an Academy Award nomination wasn’t on the cards this year. So, on the eve of the announcements, she did what any fun-loving 27-year-old actor with nothing to prove might do: she went out dancing. With her sister Dakota, she headed to Chateau Marmont, the Hollywood hotel whose candle­­lit corners, late hours and free-flowing martinis have long created a hedonistic sanctuary for the A-list. And that’s where they stayed until half two in the morning. Finally, the pair returned to their parents’ house nearby and collapsed into their childhood bedrooms. A few hours later, when the sun rose, her phone started buzzing. The house erupted. ‘I was screaming. My mom was there, with my grandmother and sister. My aunt had driven around,’ she says. Generations of Fanning women together in hys­terical celebration. ‘I wish we’d filmed it – we looked completely nuts.’

It feels fitting, then, that she suggests we meet at the Chateau. It’s an uncharacteristically warm March evening and, even as night settles, the air remains sticky. In the garden, where I’m waiting, there’s an unmistakable awards-season hum. It’s Oscars week, Los Angeles’ most illustrious date. Show tunes from a inside piano drift through the doors while rounds of iced margaritas circulate. Fanning arrives looking every bit the Hollywood ingénue, fresh-faced, bright-eyed, her long flaxen hair pulled back, her skin bare but glazed. She’s wearing Givenchy by Sarah Burton: an immaculately cut white tuxedo, the sharp tailoring softened by the faintest peek of a black lace bra. ‘I’m overdressed,’ she says, smiling. She slips into her seat, ordering a Coke. ‘I’m coming from a thing…’ she says. By ‘thing’, she means that she has just picked up a Saturn Award for her performance in Predator: Badlands, which she’d been celebrating with Tom Cruise. Just another normal Sunday night in Hollywood.

This isn’t the first time that I’ve sat down with Fanning. In 2016, when she was promoting 20th Century Women, we met in this very garden. She was 18 then and had the same relentless thirst and Pollyanna view about her future. If anything, her skin is possibly a little more luminous now. ‘Oh god,’ she grins when I remind her. ‘I am always here.’ She looks around lovingly. ‘It feels like my place. I know it does for lots of others, but I was running around here when I was 11; it was my playground.’ She’s referring to the making of Sofia Coppola’s Somewhere (2010), where she plays the daughter of Stephen Dorff’s character. ‘I still know lots of the waiters and the staff.’

Her biggest transformation came on set of The Great, in which she acted as an executive producer as well as the star for the first time. ‘[That character] taught me about my womanhood, because she’s so strong. She’s also the closest to my true personality. The experience molded me and pushed me to my limits’, she says. It also allowed her to lean into comedy for the first time. ‘I got a lot more comfortable with [the genre]. It’s so hard to tell a joke and hit it. I had to be able to fully embarrass myself and not be selfish’.