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Few actresses in Hollywood had a better 2025 than Elle Fanning, as the 27-year-old actress not only landed her first-ever Academy Award nomination for her role in Sentimental Value, but also headlined the equally successful and well-reviewed Predator: Badlands.
Speaking to BroBible ahead of the release of Predator: Badlands on digital, director Dan Trachtenberg gushed about Elle Fanning and what she brought to the role, including uncanny and unteachable physical gifts such as being able to play dead and having “interesting double-jointedness.”
Predator: Badlands director Dan Trachtenberg gushes about Oscar-nominated star Elle Fanning and what she brought to the dual roles of Thia and Tessa
BROBIBLE: What did OSCAR-NOMINATED (!) Elle Fanning bring to the role that wasn’t on the page?
DAN TRACHTENBERG: Oscar nominated, I know — so cool. Very cool. A lot of times, the dual role thing — she’s playing the comedic sidekick in some respects, and the antagonist. Usually those are two different kinds of actors. And she did both tremendously well.
She also just has a physicality that allowed for us to not have — her playing dead, her playing shut down — we didn’t need to rely on rigs or suspenders or her being dragged in specific ways. Her ability to just move differently. To walk back-to-back in certain ways. That’s not something you can cast for.
You can’t audition someone and say, “Are you good at being an inanimate robot?” She’s double-jointed in interesting ways. There were things she did physically that were surprising and awesome.
And I kind of always felt like maybe she had already been Oscar-nominated. So when she was, it felt like, “Oh, that makes sense.” She’s just that good.
Predator: Badlands will be available 2/12 on Hulu and on 4K UHD, Blu-ray and DVD 2/17. As for Fanning, she’ll next be seen starring in Rosebush Pruning, as Effie Trinket in The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping, and the AppleTV series Margo’s Got Money Troubles.