Dakota Fanning, who grew up under the glare of cameras, is now in her thirties and re-evaluating what success and fulfillment truly mean. "With each passing year, you become more in tune with who you are and what you want and don't want," Fanning told Byrdie in an interview published on Monday. "I'm associating this decade with the next part of my life. I've always wanted to have kids – it's something I've never questioned and has always been incredibly important to me. So, hopefully, dating will end soon, and this next decade will bring that into my life," the actor shared.
Fanning became the youngest person to be nominated for a Screen Actors Guild Award for her breakthrough role in 2001's "I Am Sam," alongside Sean Penn and Michelle Pfeiffer. She continued to star in a string of films in the early 2000s, including 2005's "War of the Worlds" with Tom Cruise. More recently, she is starring alongside Sarah Snook in the Peacock thriller "All Her Fault."
Entering her 30s brought about a mental "shift" for Fanning. "Instead of focusing on the things that I don't have yet, I switched it to, 'Oh my god, how exciting. There's so much that's yet to come.' I want to continue to tell myself to be excited instead of worrying. I want to focus on possibility. It's all yet to come," she said.
Being close to the women in her family has helped Fanning navigate the pressures of fame, including the labels the media placed on her. "I feel deeply known by the people in my life, by my family, friends, and the people I work with. And because I feel very known by them, I don't feel this pressure for everyone else to know me exactly," Fanning shared.
Even now, she says she's still in the process of growing and getting to know herself. "I'm still learning about myself, and I'm not going to be perfect all the time. I'm not going to make the 'wise beyond your years' choice at every step. I've definitely had times where I've had to work through that," Fanning said. "But very fortunately, I've always had a strong sense of myself and a healthy ability to block out what feels untrue or too heavy."
Fanning joins a list of celebrities reflecting on how their 30s brought a sense of clarity that they didn't have before. At a TIME100 summit in April, Ryan Reynolds said his "greatest superpower" was knowing who he was – something that didn't click until he was in his 30s. "When you're young and in your 20s, at least I was, you're trying on personalities like they're shirts," Reynolds said. In June, country star Kelsea Ballerini said that her fitness goals shifted after she entered her 30s. "Especially in my early twenties and mid-twenties, the idea of fitness was very much only aesthetically driven, and that was my goal," Ballerini told People, adding that now, she wants to be healthy and have the energy to keep up with her career and the people she loves.
