Dakota Fanning has an inner "badass" persona.

The actress confessed she finds being bad more fun than being a good girl.

The star has a double-sided personality and often stems her true naughty nature in favour of the girl-next-door image she is best known for.

“Yeah, for sure [I can be badass and good-girl]. For me, I’m the person that witnesses someone being rude at a coffee shop and I walk home, like, I should have said, 'What’s your problem, man' You know what I mean' I’m that person. I feel badass in spirit, but overall a good-girl, but badass is trying to come out and when she does it’s like 'Woah! Where did that come from'" Dakota laughed to Refinery 29. "You know' I think I’m a mixture of both things.”

The 18-year-old American star appears in this year's movie Very Good Girls alongside fellow hotly-tipped young actress Elizabeth Olsen. In the film Dakota plays Lilly Berger, a high school student who makes a pact with her friend Gerry, played by Elizabeth, to lose their virginity over the summer.

The film premiered at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival to mixed reviews, with discussion focusing around the movie's themes of young women having sex and being in control of their love lives.

“People are fascinated with that [young women having sex] because I think we’ve all seen enough of guys pursuing girls, and guys getting girls, and guys sleeping with girls, and choosing and pitting them against one another. I think it’s really refreshing to see girls in the driver’s seat of that and making their own choices because that’s how we really are now. It’s like Naomi [Foner, the Very Good Girls director] said when she was growing up; she didn’t have any one she could really identify with that was in the films except for Katharine Hepburn," Dakota continued. "It was always a man. I think everyone is like 'guys, you know…whatever'. I think it’s time for us to see girls being the guys.”

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