Elle Fanning Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images These days, few actors have the kind of weekend at the box office that Elle Fanning is coming off of. The Golden Globe nominee toplined the new tentpole Predator: Badlands, which outperformed tracking expectations to gross $40 million domestically and set a record for the Predator franchise, while she also played a key supporting role in Joachim Trier's Norwegian Oscar contender Sentimental Value, a richly lifelike drama that has already won major prizes out of Cannes and various regional festivals. Neon opened Sentimental Value on just four screens starting Friday, but the film took in $200,000, marking one of the best platform-release openings of the year. Related Stories Movies Til Schweiger, Charlie Gillespie Board Chess Action Thriller 'Contra' Movies Box Office Badass: 'Predator Badlands' Kicks Off November With Record $40M U.S. Opening, $80M Globally Actors don't have any control over when their movies are released, but for Fanning, the convergence feels only appropriate. She shot these two films back to back, and their drastic differences in scale and appeal - the only things they have in common, really, are that critics really like them and that Fanning does terrific work in both - perfectly represent Fanning's goals as an actor. "I don't want to be put into a box," she tells The Hollywood Reporter. "I want to try all genres, to try it all. I want to be challenged." In Sentimental Value, Fanning digs deep as a famous American actress who's been cast by a revered Norwegian director (Stellan Skarsgård) in a drama either inspired by his late wife or, maybe, his estranged daughter (Renate Reinsve). In Badlands, meanwhile, she's on double duty, portraying two synthetics - one the ever-curious companion to our young predator Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi), the other her antagonistic sister. As Fanning basks in the success of the two - with a good shot at earning her first Oscar nomination for one of them - she admits she's thinking back to the task of playing dual roles on a single project. "I'm in New York right now and I'm trying to clone myself to do press at the same time for both," she says with a laugh. "But yes, it's very exciting." Is it safe to say this feels like a big year for you? I think we can say that. (Laughs) You know what? From when I was a young girl, I knew that 2025 would be an exciting year. I love five, the number. (Laughs) I don't know, I always felt that way. I am a very instinctual person. I feel so happy. When you start working at two years old, you're going to feel shifts and changes constantly in those years. That's just a given. And so there have been moments where I have felt the growth physically, or felt a new chapter beginning. Somewhere was that. Super 8 was certainly that. I have The Great to thank for a lot of things - that's the character that I'm the most close to, where I got to experiment and really push myself, and I felt that shift. Now I'm feeling another shift. It's a new chapter. Seeing both Predator and Sentimental Value thrive in theaters last weekend in their own ways, I'm curious if there were any lessons for you in how and why they worked. I know you're getting deeper into producing and scouting your own material, and this is a year where I feel like we're hearing a good deal of panic about movies succeeding in theaters. I've been thinking about it. There's a throughline with both to me. Both directors and the people around them - the producers who make the films happen - are very unwavering in their vision. Audiences are not looking for something that's been formulated or calculated for them. They don't want a director to say, "We're going to do this because audiences like this, and in this percentage of people, this works." There's no mathematical equation for art or for films. Dan Trachtenberg is a fanboy himself. He was at Comic-Con and in Hall H growing up, so he had this big swing of an idea that he was quite unwavering with, and he also had people to back him that allowed him to do it, because also it might not have been accepted. It's an unprecedented thing for the franchise to make the Predator the protagonist, and to have the synths involved, and a robot backpack. (Laughs.) And Sentimental Value is such an honest, personal film. It's unwavering in that it's just truthful. It's his vision. Only he could tell it. When you watch films, for me, the more specific and detailed you get - the less generalized it feels - the more universally it affects people. The film doesn't heal. It's left in an open-ended way. It doesn't tie it up in a bow. There's progress and there's some understanding there. It doesn't have the movie gloss of, "Everything's perfect!" That's not life. Sentimental Value Courtesy of Neon You made Badlands and Sentimental Value back to back, right? Yes. I had finished A Complete Unknown, and I was still in New York. Dan called me and I had talked to Dan and read that script and was v