Rooney Mara had a hard time convincing Director David Fincher that she was right for the role. But mentally she had want he needed. As Rooney told
Vogue, "I’ve always been sort of a loner. I didn’t play team sports. I am better one-on-one than in big groups. I can understand wanting to be invisible and mistrusting people and wanting to understand everything before you engage with the world.”
After numerous callbacks Fincher finally started to embrace Rooney as his number one choice. Rooney was lovable but also strange. Fincher embraced Rooney's strangeness saying, "She’s a weirdo. She’s a great weird."
Rooney Mara who looked sweet and beautiful in Fincher's
The Social Network, but she had to go through a tremendous physical transformation to become the alien like creature Fincher wanted.
And so began an agonizing period for Mara. “It was like, ‘Come in. We need you to do this, we need you to do that.’ That’s all I thought about and all I did for weeks.” She mentions a time Fincher said, “Go out and get really, really drunk and come in the next morning so we can take pictures of you.” He wanted to show Sony that she could look strung out. “And I did it!” says Mara. “Threw up all night!”
She is referring to her complete physical transformation at the hands of Pat McGrath, the doyenne of haute makeup; rock-diva hairstylist Danilo; and the costume designer Trish Summerville. As Summerville says, “We didn’t want her to be this girl who looks like a musician in a rock band. She’s real. A lot of the time she’s dirty. She wipes her nose on her sleeve.”
Holed up in a tiny studio for two days with Fincher and Mara, McGrath created about 26 different looks. “We went from the white-powdered sick-clown makeup to stitches in the face all the way to greasy, bloody eyes. I instantly knew how I could make her character so different. And then once the hair was cut in that mad shape, I was like, Well, the eyebrows have got to go. And in the end, it would look now and it would look new.”
Two weeks later, Mara was in a New York hotel room, where Danilo “cut my hair, shaved the sides, bleached the eyebrows, then dyed my hair black,” she says. “Then we went and did the piercings—all in one day. I went in looking like Erica Albright and I came out like this.” Was she traumatized? “The eyebrows were the biggest shock because that really changed my face, and I didn’t recognize myself. But I was fine because I knew it was going to be really helpful for getting into character.”
DC Entertainment is releasing graphic novels in print and digitally based on Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy.
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo will be released by the company's Vertigo imprint in 2012, with sequel The Girl Who Played With Fire following in 2013 and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest in 2014. - THR
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