Infamous Interviews: Rooney Mara for Vogue, November 2011
About 10 years ago (!!!!), Rooney Mara and Daniel Craig were promoting The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. The movie was a smash in Sweden and the book had sold several million copies. Rooney was the up-and-coming It Girl; Craig, the veteran movie star. And David Fincher was the cult director at the center of the film.
When you combined these three? The results were...weird.
Rooney Mara: Playing With Fire
By Jonathan Van Meter
Vogue, November 2011
- As Fincher talks about the film, his heroine, Mara-with Salander’s awesomely strange hair, bleached eyebrows, and facial piercings-sits next to him, looking for all the world like a troubled college student who takes too much Adderall. She hangs on his every word, her eyes lit with admiration. Their relationship, it quickly becomes clear, is charged with the electric current of the mentor-protégée crush, which is both touching and occasionally uncomfortable to watch. Or, as Daniel Craig, who costars as a crusading journalist named Mikael Blomkvist, says about their working relationship, “It’s fucking weird!”
- When a waiter appears to take our order, we are all looking at our menus, but I see out of the corner of my eye Fincher nudging Mara. He says with quiet seriousness, “You can eat.” I look up to see her reaction. Mara rolls her eyes, and Fincher laughs. “You can have lettuce and a grape. A raisin if you must.” She orders a piece of fish and barely touches it.
- In the book, Salander is described as boyish and awkward, “a pale, anorexic young woman who has hair as short as a fuse. . . .” Noomi Rapace, the magnetic star of the Swedish versions, looked more like Joan Jett. “One of the things that make our version that much more heartbreaking,” says Mara, “is that even though I am playing a 24-year-old, I look much younger. I look like a child.” I ask if she had to get unhealthily skinny for the role. She says, “Umm . . . not really.” “It hasn’t been too hard for her,” Fincher quickly adds.
- Lunch in hand, we head to her favorite park-which also happens to be a cemetery-only to find every bench occupied. “Is it weird to sit on a tomb?” she says. “It’s kind of perfect, right?” We walk over to one that is big and flat and low. “Is this a good tomb?” Laughing, we spread out our picnic on top of the ancient stone casket.
- Meanwhile, Fincher was also screen-testing every conceivable Salander on the planet. “We flew in people from New Zealand and Swaziland and all over the place,” he says. “Look, we saw some amazing people. Scarlett Johansson was great. It was a great audition, I’m telling you. But the thing with Scarlett is, you can’t wait for her to take her clothes off.” He stops for a moment. “I keep trying to explain this. Salander should be like E.T. If you put E.T. dolls out before anyone had seen the movie, they would say, ‘What is this little squishy thing?’ Well, you know what? When he hides under the table and he grabs the Reese’s Pieces, you love him! It has to be like that.”
More infamous interviews: John Mayer, Britney Spears, Tom Hiddleston, 5 Seconds of Summer, Jessica Alba, Angelina Jolie, M.I.A., Chris Evans, Jennifer Lopez, Kate Winslet, Beyoncé, Channing Tatum, Cara Delevingne, Johnny Depp, Miles Teller, and Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love
Notorious photoshoots with The Beckhams, Lady Gaga, Rihanna, and Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt.
Photshoot is gorgeous, though.
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