Classic Reissue: Vogue Thinks Rooney Mara and David Fincher are Weird
A star is born with the girl with the dragon tattoo but her svengali is also right there...
I turned 34 this week and as a gift I’m sharing a classic issue of Gossip Reading Club from the pre-Substack days for all my subscribers. This is usually only available to paid ones but hey, it’s fun to spread the birthday joy. Also, the subject of this issue just had their second baby (congratulations!)
Vogue. “Rooney Mara: Playing With Fire.” October 16, 2011. Jonathan Van Meter.
It's been about 14 years since the release of David Fincher's adaptation of the wildly popular Steig Larsson novel The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. The first book in the Millennium trilogy, all of which were published posthumously, became an undisputed pop culture phenomenon upon release and kickstarted the Nordic Noir craze. While a trilogy of Swedish adaptations had found solid success in international territories -- and helped to launch Noomi Rapace's stardom -- it was inevitable that Hollywood would produce its own remake. Sony Pictures hoped it would kick off a multi-million-dollar franchise, one with major awards potential thanks to Fincher's acclaimed back-catalog.
The glut of the feverish coverage focused on the casting of the titular role: who would play Lisbeth Salander? The vulnerable yet flinty computer hacker with a brutal past and fashion style somewhere between S&M goth and Pippi Longstocking was the role of the decade. The profile we’re discussing today called it the most sought-after role since Scarlett O’Hara. A search for the right actress saw some of the biggest names in the business floated as potential Lisbeths: Scarlett Johansson, Keira Knightley, Carey Mulligan, Kristen Stewart, Natalie Portman, Eva Green... and then the role went to Rooney Mara. In 2009, you may have known Mara as Mark Zuckerberg's ex-girlfriend with the fiery monologue in The Social Network, or as the lead in the rather bland remake of Nightmare on Elm Street. Nobody predicted she would get the role, and Vogue's 2011 profile, which placed her on the cover, was intended as a real A Star is Born moment. This was the introduction of the Next Big Thing, a talented and beautiful actress who totally transformed herself for the most coveted role in the game.
That transformation, which was rather obsessed over at the time, had already been revealed prior to any real marketing of the film in a February 2011 issue of W Magazine. Lynn Hirschberg describes how Mara's hair was dyed black and cut "in a series of jagged points that looked as if she had chopped it herself with a dull razor." Her brows were bleached, and she received a series of piercings in her ears, brow, and nipple. She learned how to skateboard and kickbox, underwent dialect training to play the Swedish Lisbeth, picked up some basic computer hacking skills, and lost some weight. That photoshoot was directed, so to speak, by Fincher himself. This is "his" Lisbeth, as the piece notes, and in context, it's hard to tell if they mean the character or the actress. Maybe both?
Vogue’s profile is more predictably “pretty”, focusing less on the transformation into Lisbeth and more on Mara’s return to glamour. The shoot itself is actually really good, blending some goth chic with the kind of classic style that seems very fitting for Mara. The cover image of her in a stunning dress with a dragon embellishment on the back is ideally suited to the assignment. The message is clear: she IS Lisbeth Salander, or at least she was before she took all the piercings out.
Introducing a new star to the world can provide an array of challenges. You can’t fake real hype and you can’t get people to care about someone they just aren’t interested in. When said actor is also being sold inextricably alongside a character who millions have become attached to – one who was already portrayed by a different actor to much success – then the stakes get higher. This narrative certainly wouldn’t have felt quite so loaded had an established figure like Portman or Johansson won the role. Moreover, Mara is also being sold as something that’s far less palatable and a way bigger potential minefield: as David Fincher’s muse.
Re-reading the profile, it’s surprising how little of it is actually about Mara. Fincher seems to get more focus, both as a director and as the guy bringing Mara to the world. It’s all about how Fincher found Mara, how he chose her to take on this beloved role, and how he’s guided her through this difficult process. Her co-star Daniel Craig at one point says, “I wish I’d had someone like David at Rooney’s age just to guide me and say what’s good and what’s bad.” Of course, Craig also says, in reference to the curious closeness between Mara and Fincher, “It’s f**king weird!”
That tends to be what most people remember of this profile, that strange dynamic of Svengali and muse between the notorious hard-ass director and the mostly unknown actress under the harsh gaze of the spotlight. The pair are described as being thick as thieves, with Mara by his side, she "hangs on his every word, her eyes lit with admiration." When they order dinner, Mara, who has gotten extremely skinny to play Lisbeth, is told by Fincher that she's allowed to eat, a moment that feels especially disquieting. Their conversations are described as being "charged with the electric current of the mentor-protégée crush, which is both touching and occasionally uncomfortable to watch." How often have you read a glowing PR piece that openly says there's something kind of off about the people involved?
This makes the balance of the piece inherently askew because Fincher’s the one with the power and the allure that Vogue is keen to focus on. Mara, by extension, is the model. The journalist seems less interested in her motivations and decisions in playing Lisbeth than in how Fincher moulds or dictates them for her. It's not just Fincher either. Make-up legend Pat McGrath said she was "instantly inspired" by Mara's face because it reminded her of models who have "one of those haunting faces that you can do absolutely anything with." There’s a sense that she’s the tough woman willing to go toe-to-toe with him – in her four days on-set for The Social Network, Fincher says they did 2,400 takes?! – but you never doubt who’s in charge. That’s certainly a weird angle to sell his film on given that so much of the books’ marketing focused on “badass” Lisbeth. Then again, that was never an entirely accurate way to sell the Millennium novels, which are bleak and messy and veer between fetishizing Lisbeth and ripping such misogynistic notions to shreds. It’s a contradictory novel and making a conventional Hollywood movie out of it was never going to happen with Fincher at the helm. It’s almost fitting that this is the star-making narrative we got out of it.
When the piece does dig more into Mara, it’s not thrillingly recounted. Mara, whose first name is actually Patricia, is American football royalty, with one side of her family owning the Pittsburgh Steelers and the other owing the New York Giants. She’s cagey about being labelled as a rich girl and pushes back against claims she grew up in the lap of luxury. She's a tad too candid about the disdain she had for her acting projects pre-Fincher, like the remake of Nightmare on Elm Street and the token Law and Order appearance all New York based actors must do. But she's also aware that this part will push her into the upper echelons of fame and industry know-how, "breaking out at the very top." That impending media circus is something she seems fearful of for obvious reasons, aware from the "cocoon of Fincherworld."
So much of the novels and the character of Lisbeth were designed for discourse, for better or worse. This is a role that not only required a major physical transformation but a full-throated commitment to being the focus of extreme brutality. Lisbeth is raped, beaten, abused, and neglected, often at the hands of those who were supposed to protect her. The rape scene in the film is terrifying, a moment that I still have trouble watching. It was something Mara was asked about a lot during the promotional cycle. In the Vogue profile, she is honest about how tough it was to do but also insistent that she was "fine" after a few days of rest. Mercifully, she isn't asked to extrapolate on the experience, nor is it positioned as a sign of her method-esque commitment to the craft and therefore something to see as noble.
Vogue’s profiles, and indeed many celebrity profiles of famous women, can be weirdly voyeuristic. I could probably commit this newsletter entirely to pieces where the female subjects are openly leered over by the writer and never run out of material. That’s not exactly the case here, but there is something discomfiting about how Mara is viewed in terms of her appearance and perceived sex appeal, or the lack thereof when she is in Lisbeth Mode. A lot of focus is on how Mara no longer looks or dresses in what is seen as traditionally feminine styles. Words like “boyish” and “androgynous” are used. At the time of the interview, an explicit version of the movie poster had leaked, wherein Mara is fully nude with Daniel Craig's arm wrapped possessively around her (Mara says it's not meant to be submissive, but I personally don't think the image ever read as powerful or a subversion of expectations.) Mara is positioned as the ideal Lisbeth in contrast to Scarlett Johansson, a famous auditionee for the role, because she's not as sexy as her. Fincher grossly says that "the thing with Scarlett is, you can’t wait for her to take her clothes off." Lisbeth, he says, "should be like E.T."
F**king hell, David. Is that the only way you could think of to say that Johansson wouldn’t have been right for the role? He seems to say it as though it’s a compliment to Scarlett, and another sign of how Mara is some near-inhuman weirdo. His new muse is still objectified, even if he doesn’t talk about wanting to bang her.
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was a critical success but didn’t make the money Sony hoped it would, thanks to its relatively high production costs. It was a brutal film, in keeping with its subject matter, and not an easy to sell to the masses who may have just wanted a classic thriller. It was chosen by National Board of Review as one of the top ten films of 2011 and won an Oscar for Best Editing. Most notably, it landed Mara a nomination for Best Actress. Her Star is Born moment certainly paid off in a big way here, although nobody expected her to win in a category with Meryl Streep playing Margaret Thatcher (possibly hot take time but I think that performance is trash and Mara should have won.) Sony spent years hinting at a sequel, which Mara was extremely keen to do (her very earnest emails to Amy Pascal, which were revealed as part of the mass leak of Sony data, are oddly sweet.) She even kept her piercings in just in case, but it never happened. Eventually, they rebooted the series with a smaller budget, a less prestigious aim, and another rising star in the lead: The Crown actress Claire Foy. She was all wrong for the part, looking more like a posh girl in cosplay than the lived-in abrasiveness of Lisbeth. There was far less focus on said “transformation” in the press for The Girl in the Spider’s Web but also way less creative ambition. The end result was a rather dull film and audiences simply did not care.
Rooney Mara didn't exactly become a major star, which seems to be how she likes it. She's worked with strong directors but, aside from a super misguided turn as Tiger Lily in Joe Wright's Pan (yikes all round), has stuck to the indie scene. She landed another Oscar nomination and won Best Actress at Cannes for her turn in Todd Haynes's Carol. She hasn't been on the big screen since 2018, having taken time off to work on a vegan clothing line and settle down with Joaquin Phoenix, who she met while working on the Spike Jonze film Her. Now there's a relationship that makes way too much sense to me. They have a son called River and that detail continues to make me emotional. They started a production company together and, when they are seen together in public or the press, it’s for a charitable endeavour, like chimpanzee sanctuaries or supporting Gaza.
Mara’s acting career has slowed down, apparently by her own hand. She was in Guillermo del Toro’s Nightmare Alley and Sarah Polley’s Women Talking, the latter of which won an Oscar. She’s trying to get an Audrey Hepburn biopic off the ground, as well as another couple of movies with Phoenix. He is certainly the more famous half of the couple but both remain extremely low-key when not working. And they’re now two-time parents.
Did Vogue, Dragon Tattoo, and Fincher help to mould a new star? Sort of? By the logic of Who?Weekly, I would say that Rooney Mara is a prestige Them, if not necessarily a household name. Paparazzi follow her now and then, but my mum wouldn’t be able to pick her out of a line-up. She definitely has her fans and won’t have to worry about getting strong acting gigs in the future, plus she’s one of the faces of Givenchy, so she’s definitely in a sturdy position, career-wise. I would say she’s on the level of someone like Brie Larson before he became Captain Marvel, which seems to suit her. I can’t see Mara, for example joining a superhero franchise, which seems to be mandatory for all actors in the 2020s.
Mara would grace the cover of Vogue once more in October 2017, ostensibly to promote Mary Magdalene, which had been pushed back by the Weinstein Company at this point in time. This editorial is far more mundane, with Mara front and center but not especially keen to reveal all to her interviewer. You get a better sense of her as an actress in this piece, which I appreciate, but aside from that, it’s your standard Vogue profile with not much to say beyond the glow of the name. Overall, it’s a much better fit for Mara, an unassuming indie figure rather than a megastar in need of an almighty male guide. I do think that, with the right writer at the helm, you can make any profile interesting, but it’s also true that some celebrities just aren’t as natural a fit for this process as others.
Thanks for reading.
You can find my work scattered around the internet. For Pajiba, I wrote about why the TV version of Daniel Molloy in Interview with the Vampire is better than the one in the books. I also wrote about Will Smith and the hottest image on the internet. For Inverse, I wrote about the very weird Mike Nichols werewolf movie Wolf, as well as the strange camp comedic remake of The Stepford Wives. For The Daily Beast, I wrote about Glen Powell and why “selling out” isn’t that bad when you’re good at it. For The AV Club, I wrote about the great animated movie battle of the Summer of 1999: Disney’s Tarzan versus the South Park movie. For Paste Books, I settled the “man vs. bear” internet debate with a classic Canadian novel where a woman f*cks a bear. For Primetimer, I wrote about one of my favourite one-season TV shows, the demon-hunting millennial horror-comedy Crazyhead.
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And thanks to those of you who sent me birthday wishes! I had a lovely day. I got a Thai massage and a new CD player. Rock and roll.