Elle Fanning Finally Has the Haircut She's Always Wanted for a Surprising Reason

In the early days of getting a new, significantly shorter haircut, it's all I can think about. I can't resist the compulsion to run my fingers through my hair or do a double (or triple) take in a mirror, reveling in how much lighter I feel. Elle Fanning, debuting a bouncy, just-below-the-chin-length bob at the Cannes Film Festival, is currently in that stage.

"It's never been this short ever," Fanning tells me on a video call from the L'Oréal Paris suite at Hôtel Martinez in Cannes, France. She fluffs the slightly, curled edges and tosses her head side-to-side to show off the length—a massive departure from the long, ribcage-length hair she's known for onscreen (in period dramas like The Great) and off (strolling through New York City in her favorite dresses). "It feels so good."

Most people make a hair transformation like Fanning's exactly when they want to. But the actress, who says she'd always wanted to have a dramatic lob, had her characters to consider. She just wrapped a run on Broadway alongside Sarah Paulson in the play Appropriate, and her alter-ego had long hair with grown-out roots.

By the time the play closed, her roots "ere like down to here"—she gestures halfway down the length of her current chop—"and my hair just hadn't been cut in a while." (The things we do for art!) But her next role wouldn't hold her back from the haircut she always wanted.

Starting production on the Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown alongside Timothée Chalamet this spring, Fanning found a workaround. "I knew I was wearing a wig in the movie I'm doing now. So I think I was free to do whatever," she says. "I wasn't held to a character and I thought, let's do it for summer."

In her short hair era, Fanning has discovered an entirely new outlook on style. "This haircut is also informing so many different outfit decisions and I feel like I can wear things now that I couldn't necessarily wear before," she says.

For Cannes, Fanning says the bob enhances a "preppy" side she didn't know she had. She leaned into it with lacy, vintage Chanel dresses and a black bow pinned into a teased, half-up, half-down hairstyle for her first day of the festival.

Even when she's out of character, Fanning sees beauty as a narrative she builds with help from her clothing. "I really think it's all about a story that you're trying to tell," she explains. For the Met Gala, she wanted to look like glass—so she literally commissioned a glass dress from Balmain, and "then on my body, I was like really shiny." For the South of France, she wants to be Old Hollywood with a preppy twist, so she's combining spring suiting and sundresses with her fresh new cut.

"One thing informs the other," Fanning says. And regardless of how she styles her hair, it's exactly what she wants.

Shop Elle Fanning's Cannes Hair and Makeup Essentials