Try as they might to remain professional, sisters Dakota and Elle Fanning had a sisterly squabble on the set of their new movie, The Nightingale.
During an appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon on Tuesday, August 11, Dakota, 32, spilled the beans on sharing the screen with younger sibling Elle, 28, for the very first time in the upcoming adaptation of Kristin Hannah’s epic World War II novel.
“We were quietly nervous about it,” the All Her Fault actress admitted of working together. “I think we didn’t really want to tell the other one how nervous we were.”
While Dakota said she and the Margo’s Got Money Troubles star “totally acted in our playroom together” when they were children, they had never acted together to this extent before.
“We were like, ‘Are we gonna laugh? Like, are we gonna be able to keep it together?’” Dakota recalled. “It’s the person that knows you best in the world that you’re acting with, and we’re super close. We were a little silently panicked.”
“I was nervous because she had made it clear that I was not allowed to do any older sister behavior on set,” she added. “I had to treat her like I would treat any other actor. And I did, for the most part.”
But towards the end of production, the sibling dynamic between the stars came out — much to the crew’s delight.
“But right towards the end, there was a scene we were doing … it was like this really hot room and we were on this couch, and I was like, ‘Move your leg!’” Dakota said. “And she was like, ‘My leg has been here all day.’ I was like, ‘No, it hasn’t. Get off of me. I’m too hot. You’re sweating on me.’ She was like, ‘You’re sweating on me!’ I was like, ‘Stop talking!’”
“It was the only ‘fight’ — it was not a fight — [we had on set],” the Emmy nominee added. “The crew was dying because we had kept it so together the whole time. They were dying because it was so sisters.”
In The Nightingale, which the Fannings also coproduce, Dakota and Elle respectively play sisters Vianne Mauriac and Isabelle Rossignol, who find themselves resisting Nazi occupation in France during World War II in very different ways. The film, adapted from Hannah’s best-selling 2015 novel, also costars Oscar winner Mark Rylance as their father, Julien Rossignol.
The Nightingale is set for release on March 19, 2027.
