Rooney Mara says it was someone else who first saw her as Salander. A friend of her mother’s read the book and emailed, “Rooney has to play this part — she is this girl.”
Which is how Rooney Mara has ended up taking the larger-than-life role of Lisbeth Salander in the Hollywood film adaptation of Sieg Larsson’s bestseller The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.
“David (Fincher, director) didn’t want to see me, originally,” she says, speaking to this month's edition of Empire Magazine. “It took a minute for him to wrap his head around it, because he only knew me as Erica Albright — and I only worked for four days on The Social Network.”
It took two and a half months, three or four “real” screen-tests and about four or five on the side “that no one knew about” to secure Salander. Mara was called to Fincher’s Hollywood Boulevard office for one final test, just about ready to blow. “I was like, ‘You guys have to decide if I’m this girl or not, because I have to move on with my life at some point.’ Of course, I didn’t say any of that. I was like, ‘Fine, whatever!’” She laughs.
The process had been drawn out because, as Fincher has it, Sony was keen on someone else — a star who nailed the accent and attitude in auditions, but was beaten out by Mara’s quicksilver quality. “I just kept coming back to Rooney,” says Fincher. “Just going, ‘She’s got something...’ Part of it was I kept coming back to the puppy that nobody wanted, you know? We kept putting her through more and more. I loved her work ethic.”
The last ‘test’ turned out to be an offer. “I was ready to kill someone”, she revealed. “David gave some long speech. He said something like, ‘Vivien Leigh was extraordinary in A Streetcar Named Desire but she will always be Scarlett O’Hara. And whoever plays this girl, if they do it right, they will be Ginger from Gilligan’s Island for the rest of their life. You have to know that your life is going to change and I’m not even telling you that it’s going to change for the better.’”
He then handed her his iPad, its screen shimmering with the press release saying she was hired, and gave her the choice. “I did not flinch. I was like, ‘I’ve had two and a half months to think about it. You can send it out.’ And that was that.”
Five days later, Mara was in Stockholm and the costume, hair, make-up, piercings followed. Surprisingly, the transformation didn’t trouble her. “I didn’t freak out at all. Because at that point, I’d already been sort of in the part, like researching it, for two months, so to me the hair was weighing me down. I wanted to get rid of it. They were going to wait longer. I was like: ‘You just need to do it!’”
Mara is making Salander her own. Her research has included speaking with people who are on the autism spectrum, or with Asperger’s — the psychological syndrome Salander is said to suffer from. Her strongest source was the books, naturally, which she read just prior to the casting process. “I’d seen the movie and was like, ‘I can’t be that girl — that scares me!’ Noomi’s incredible. But after I’d read the three books, I was like, ‘Wait a minute, there’s something here I can relate to, on a very extreme level, where I think I can be this girl. Not only that, but I feel like I have to.”
Speaking about the film’s director, David Fincher, she added: “He doesn’t care what people think about him. F**k them. It doesn’t matter. I think maybe where it comes from is that David is one of the rare people in this business who actually really, really cares and believes in what he’s doing and he’s unwilling to compromise it... And generally he’s always right.”
This feature appears in full in this month's edition of Empire Magazine, on sale now.