19 Great Performances by Women Playing Love Interests

Elle Fanning and Gabriel Basso in Super 8 (2011), screenshot courtesy of Paramount Pictures

4. Elle Fanning (Super 8)

The role: Alice Dainard is the crush of Joel Courtney’s 14-year-old protagonist, Joe Lamb. She agrees to make an amateur movie with Joe and his friends, and they get embroiled in the strange events that start to afflict their town.

Why she’s great: Fanning is the youngest of the kid actors in Super 8, but you would never guess from watching the movie – and not just because she’s so freaking tall. The actress, then 13 years old, possesses the poise and discipline of someone who has spent decades in front of a camera (director J.J. Abrams once attributed her maturity to “supernatural life experience”, which would seem flippant if it didn’t seem true). It’s not purely a matter of screen presence, like with many inexperienced performers. As Alice, whose less-than-idyllic upbringing consists of an absentee mother and a drunkard father, Fanning navigates rocky emotional terrain without ever coming across as overly mannered or self-indulgent.

Standout moment: As an outsider to Joe’s friend group (not to mention the only girl), Alice is rather reticent when she joins them for a late-night shoot at the train station. She talks only when necessary and doesn’t participate in their adolescent banter. All of that awkwardness dissipates, however, when she reads her lines as the wife of a detective. Suddenly, a hush descends, and the camera (the real one, not the one in the movie) pans around to show the other kids watching, their mouths agape. It’s corny, but it works because Fanning really is that good. Like Joe and his friends, you know she is something special.