Growing up to become a Disney princess is every girl’s fantasy. For Elle Fanning, it actually happened.
“To say I’m Aurora is still so weird — I have to keep pinching myself,” the 5-foot-8 actress gushes to The Post. “She was my favorite because I felt like I looked like her the most — the blond hair and the pink dress, and she’s the tallest princess. So that worked out really well.”
Aurora, better known as Sleeping Beauty, returns to the screen in the live action film “Maleficent,” based upon the 1959 animated classic “Sleeping Beauty.” The new movie, in theaters Thursday night, explores the untold story of the titular villain, a fairy played by a ferocious Angelina Jolie. As the story goes, Maleficent bestows a curse upon the newborn princess, dooming her to prick a finger on a spinning wheel on her 16th birthday and fall into a deep slumber — which can only be disturbed by true love’s kiss.
The 1959 cartoon movie had audiences believing all that anger was about not being invited to the party. Au contraire! Turns out there’s a lot of dark history — for one thing, Maleficent once had wings, which were stolen from her by Aurora’s father, the king. The lines of good and evil aren’t quite so clear, after all.
Still the same, though, is the Sleeping Beauty Fanning loved in childhood. The 16-year-old recalls dressing up with a special pair of plastic clip-on earrings adorned with the princess. Although she and her older sister Dakota — the 20-year-old actress who co-starred in the “Twilight” franchise — often role-played with games like “secretary,” Elle says Dakota would definitely have been the one to play Maleficent.
“She’d for sure want to be that one because she always liked to control me,” says Elle, laughing. “I would have to be, like, her assistant when we would play.”
That’s not so different from how Elle’s acting career began — her earliest roles were playing a younger version of Dakota in both 2001’s “I Am Sam” and the 2002 TV miniseries “Taken.” The Georgia native, who now calls LA home with her parents, got her first solo gig at age 4 in “Daddy Day Care.” She’s worked steadily since, emerging from Dakota’s shadow (though she does say if she could have had any of her sister’s roles, it would be the one in girl punk band flick “The Runaways”). Her current public personality, as a fashion-forward ingenue, came about thanks to buzzy turns in Sofia Coppola’s “Somewhere,” J.J. Abrams’ “Super 8” and the 2012 indie “Ginger & Rosa.”
When not shooting movies (let alone magazine covers), Fanning attends what she calls a “normal school” — she’s currently finishing up her sophomore year and is ready for summer, especially since Dakota’s coming home from NYU.
Despite her rising fame, Fanning still found the thought of starring opposite Angelina Jolie scary. For one thing, “Girl, Interrupted” is one of her favorite movies. But then, Jolie showed up on set.
“I didn’t know I was going to meet her that day,” Fanning recalls. “We gave each other a giant hug and the first thing she said was, ‘We’re going to have so much fun working together!’ ”
Now, she says, Jolie is like a maternal figure to her.
“All of her kids were on set too, so I got to see like the mom side of her,” she says. “She’d be this evil villain, and then they’d say, ‘Cut!’ and she’d be there holding her twins on each hip.”
In fact, the whole Jolie-Pitt family goofed around. During the scene in which Jolie’s 5-year-old daughter Vivienne plays a young Aurora, Brad Pitt and the children were behind the camera trying to make Jolie laugh.
“It was fun to see the playful side where she’s making jokes,” Fanning says.
While Fanning says she doesn’t have Jolie’s phone number, she’s down to watch her kids someday.
“It’s a weird dream of mine to be a babysitter,” she says, laughing.
A girl can dream.