“I have a backpack and a small carry-on for two weeks,” Rooney Mara tells me one afternoon, after collapsing into a stiff chair at a café on the eastern flank of Manhattan’s Chinatown. She has recently arrived in New York on a red-eye out of California. In a few hours she will leave again, to travel on to Europe. During the precious time in between, there is a restless version of a New York life to live. Mara has just emerged from a dusty storage unit where her whole apartment is being held on ice. (She vacated one place in February and hasn’t yet found a new home to her taste.) This afternoon she’ll visit friends, run errands, traverse Manhattan by foot; later in the year, she plans to leave the country once again, to see the gorillas in Rwanda. (“Who knows how much longer they’ll be there?”) All of this follows an astonishing two-year period during which Mara left behind the Hollywood movies that made her name—The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Carol—to focus on a run of daring, demanding indie roles, each different from the last. After years building her reputation, Rooney Mara is on the move.
“I hate having a lot of baggage. Traveling when you have nothing—no options—is the best,” she says. She is wearing a careworn vintage T-shirt (the Smiths), pants from Forever 21, and a Yigal Azrouël jacket made bespoke for her, using no animal skin. For ethical reasons, she has embarked on what she describes as the long, hard process of phasing leather out of her wardrobe. (The big challenge, she says, is the shoes.) She has her hair cut short and blends in among the café’s shiftless-chic clientele. “Don’t tell anyone where we are—no one comes here!” she says. Then, with a sly grin, “Just say we’re in Brooklyn.”
A waitress comes by, and Mara places a brisk order: “A half and half.” She catches herself. “Not the creamer,” she says. That’s half iced tea, half lemonade. She gives the tight, amused smile for which she’s known: sweet, self-aware, a little furtive, the hint of her dimples around the edges. She’s been a vegetarian most of her life, and for the past six years, also for ethical reasons, a vegan. Even in New York, the state where she grew up, there’s something otherworldly about Mara, as if she arrived from somewhere else and must translate the universe that she inhabits—the goals, the foods, the customs—into language all the rest of us can understand.
At the moment, though, her attention is all ease and warmth; this summer, Mara is at last enjoying a break after two years of intense, emotionally draining work. A few years ago, explains Mara, who’s now 32, the contours of her creative ambition changed, and since then she has tried to make the films, and live the life, she personally cares about most. “I have more trust now in the universe and things happening when they’re supposed to,” she says. “What I try to live by now is: It doesn’t matter what other people think. I try to live for myself.” In some ways, it’s her most demanding standard yet. “I have to get good at myself, which is a challenge,” she says. “I’m the meanest critic there is.”
And so if 2011, when Mara starred in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, was her year of going wide, 2017 could be her year of going deep. First she played a young widow in David Lowery’s A Ghost Story, opposite Casey Affleck—an unusual role, in an even more brilliantly unusual film, and one she shot in only six days. Then, this fall, Mara stars in Una, Benedict Andrews’s daring movie about a suburban Lolita grown up. Mara fell in love with Blackbird, the David Harrower play on which it’s based, after seeing it on the New York stage in 2007. (“I was so affected by it,” she says. “Thinking about it, reading it.”) She confessed her nagging passion for the play to Cate Blanchett, while they were making Carol, and the universe smiled. “She’s like, ‘Oh, my God, my friend Benedict is doing it, and he’s desperate to have you!’ ” Mara recalls.
In the film adaptation, Mara plays Una, a woman in her 20s trying to reenter the life of an older man (Ben Mendelsohn) who sexually abused her when she was thirteen. He seems to want nothing to do with the adult Una, and they circle each other, sparring. The film was shot quickly, in five weeks, but its heightened emotional drama required close preparation with Mendelsohn—and a distinctive mix of vulnerability and strength. “That relationship was so important because it was really intense and it was mostly just the two of us,” she tells me. “We didn’t spend a lot of time bashing over stuff. We sort of felt for each other more than anything,” Mendelsohn says. He touts Mara’s craft. “I mean, blushing on-screen? That is a kind of holy grail.”
It’s unsurprising, then, that Mara’s Una—a questing girl who has grown into a haunted adult—shapes the film’s emotional core. “She possesses a fierce intelligence that is absolutely readable and clear on-screen, and, at the same time, she also has a beguiling sense of beauty and mystery that I thought was going to be very important,” Andrews explains. “One of the reasons for the shift in title from Blackbird to Una is that we’re drawn into questions that she is desperately seeking answers to. Was this love or was this abuse? Was I the only one?” He goes on, “Rooney’s completely unafraid to go into the raw nerves, the damaged places in characters.”
In the café, Mara takes a sip of her drink and offers her famously inscrutable smile. (“There’s an enormous amount you can’t know about Rooney, and that is a really powerful characteristic,” Mendelsohn says.) Many directors view her as something of a cipher, showing up to work with an almost magical mastery of the material. David Lowery recalls her appearing on the first day of filming for his first film with her, Ain’t Them Bodies Saints. “She came to set with a character who was fully defined and was entirely hers,” he says. “She would not share with me the accent she was preparing until the first take.” Gus Van Sant, who recently directed Mara for the first time, describes her as “very self-contained.” He says, “She doesn’t need a lot from me.”
That opaque self-sufficiency has costs: A few years back, when she was chasing down a part she dearly wanted, she was brushed off. “The producers were like, ‘You’re just too Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. You’re not wide-eyed and innocent enough,’ ” she recalls. “It was right after I had shot Carol, but it hadn’t come out yet. I’m literally wide-eyed in that.”
She smiles wryly; she has come to take such disappointments in stride. “I’m sure at some point it will be the reverse: ‘You’re not edgy enough,’ ” she says. She chuckles. “It only makes me bolder. It only makes me want to be like, Fuck you! Watch me be wide-eyed and innocent!”
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