Rooney Mara: The Look of Silence

Like a stolen glance between unac­quaint­ed lovers, fate had a hand in the defin­ing chap­ter of Rooney Mara’s sto­ry. When Car­ol first called back in 2011, Mara was faced with an ago­nis­ing deci­sion, one she looks back on with mixed feel­ings. ​“As much as I adored the script, I couldn’t say yes,” she con­fess­es. ​“I need­ed time to live life a lit­tle bit before I could jump into anoth­er part.” Such was the sit­u­a­tion in which Mara found her­self after David Fincher’s The Girl with the Drag­on Tat­too, for which she worked 12 to 16 hour days over the course of a year (by com­par­i­son, Car­ol was shot in two months).

It’s unusu­al to hear an actor talk open­ly about the come down, although it stands to rea­son that switch­ing off after immers­ing your­self in a char­ac­ter like Lis­beth Salan­der should be a long and painful process. ​“There was a long peri­od after Drag­on Tat­too where I couldn’t imag­ine myself in any­thing,” she reflects. ​“I was so exhaust­ed. Emo­tion­al­ly, phys­i­cal­ly, I was com­plete­ly drained. I would read things and I just couldn’t see myself in the part. I felt like I didn’t have any­thing left to give. I thought I would be bad.”

By the time the con­ver­sa­tion came back around to Car­ol, now with both Cate Blanchett and direc­tor Todd Haynes attached, Mara was ready. ​“I hadn’t worked in almost a year,” she recalls, ​“so I was real­ly hun­gry to do some­thing. It was an easy deci­sion. Look­ing back, I can’t quite believe I ever said no. It just seems so crazy to me, because Cate is one of my favourite actors. I’ve looked up to her since… I can’t even remem­ber how long. The fact that I turned down a chance to work with her is absurd to me now. But that’s act­ing. The choic­es I make so often depend on the head space I’m in.”

If Blanchett’s strong onscreen per­sona and clas­si­cal ele­gance mark her as the Katharine Hep­burn of her gen­er­a­tion, then Mara is Louise Brooks – cool and exot­ic in an effort­less, strange­ly acces­si­ble kind of way, a 21^st-cen­tu­ry ​‘It’ girl dropped in from the Jazz Age. Just like the mer­cu­r­ial silent era icon, Mara was born into afflu­ence (her great-grand­fa­thers Art and Tim found­ed the Pitts­burgh Steel­ers and New York Giants respec­tive­ly) but had a fair­ly nor­mal upbring­ing. A rel­a­tive late­com­er to act­ing, she found her way into the movies in her ear­ly twen­ties via a hand­ful of bit-part roles, before return­ing to col­lege in New York where she grad­u­at­ed from Gal­latin in 2010. And like Brooks, Mara is known for play­ing impul­sive, sharp, sex­u­al (but nev­er sub­mis­sive or promis­cu­ous) women. Her per­for­mances, too, often fall some­where between ethe­re­al and nat­u­ral­is­tic. There’s a pre­cise­ness about her, from the way she moves and speaks – soft­ly, always with pur­pose – to the sub­tle ges­tures through which she’s able to con­vey a character’s deep­est thoughts and emo­tions. ​“Flung out of space” is how Blanchett’s epony­mous socialite so mem­o­rably describes Mara’s Therese; a line that could just as eas­i­ly have been writ­ten about the actor herself.

Read more in LWLies 62: the Car­ol issue

With the excep­tion of the Aaron Sorkin-script­ed The Social Net­work, which required Mara to ​“talk a mile a minute and squeeze sev­en pages into four min­utes,” every film she has appeared in this decade – from Drag­on Tat­too to David Lowery’s Ain’t Them Bod­ies Saints to Car­ol – has seen Mara con­scious­ly embody the min­i­mal­ist mantra ​‘less is more’. She’s always look­ing to exploit the space between words, savour­ing the qui­et moments that can have a last­ing impact on the view­er. ​“I think you can con­vey a lot through silence,” she says. ​“I’ve always been drawn to actors who are real­ly good at that – Mar­i­on Cotil­lard is some­one I could watch do any­thing, she just exudes so much feel­ing and emo­tion in every­thing she does. I could watch her doing laun­dry and it would be inter­est­ing. With Car­ol, the script already had those moments, but it’s some­thing I try to bring to every part I play. Emot­ing through silence is some­thing that comes very nat­u­ral­ly to me.”

Back in May, Mara received the Best Actress award at the 68^th Cannes Film Fes­ti­val for Car­ol, and in Sep­tem­ber was pre­sent­ed with one of three Sil­ver Medal­lion Awards at the Tel­luride Film Fes­ti­val (the oth­er two going to direc­tor Dan­ny Boyle and doc­u­men­tar­i­an Adam Cur­tis). At 30, Mara is one of the youngest recip­i­ents of the lat­ter award, which is giv­en to artists deemed to have made a sig­nif­i­cant con­tri­bu­tion to the world of cin­e­ma. If bestow­ing what is effec­tive­ly a life­time achieve­ment award upon some­one who got their act­ing break five years ago seems like a super­fi­cial ges­ture, Mara is equal­ly quick to down­play the impor­tance of such acco­lades. It’s not that she isn’t grate­ful, more that she mea­sures suc­cess dif­fer­ent­ly. ​“Any time you receive an award is a huge hon­our,” she says. ​“But even the award in Cannes, which was some­thing I did not expect at all, I prob­a­bly felt real­ly good about myself for about a day and then the next day I was back to being me, with the same goals and same hang-ups. Awards are great, but they don’t make me feel like sud­den­ly I’ve arrived.”

From speak­ing to Mara it’s clear that the man­tel­piece of her Los Ange­les home doesn’t rep­re­sent the lim­it of her ambi­tions, but when LWLies enquires about her career aspi­ra­tions she makes no attempt to hide her inse­cu­ri­ties. ​“I still feel like I have so much left to do and so many more mis­takes to make and so much more to prove,” she says, rush­ing her words. ​“I always feel like I’m just try­ing to not fuck up. I’m ter­ri­fied of being bad. Every movie I fin­ish I think, ​‘Shit, now I know how to do it bet­ter.’ That’s kind of what keeps me going.” Per­haps what’s most sur­pris­ing about hear­ing Mara speak with this lev­el of humil­i­ty is how gen­uine it feels. Exces­sive mod­esty can seem false and insin­cere when expressed by some­one whose tal­ent and charm is as unde­ni­able as her’s, yet if any­thing this can­did admis­sion serves as a reminder of how far Mara’s star has risen in such a short space of time.

In past inter­views Mara has described act­ing as an edu­ca­tion, a con­tin­u­ous process of expe­ri­en­tial learn­ing in which per­son­al devel­op­ment and pro­fes­sion­al com­pat­i­bil­i­ty are intrin­si­cal­ly linked. This was nev­er more true than on Car­ol. ​“I learned so much work­ing on this film,” she tells LWLies. ​“Just observ­ing Cate and how she works… I don’t want to get too fan­girly here, but I was in awe a lot of the time around her.” And Todd? ​“Every film­mak­er I’ve worked with has been so dif­fer­ent to the next, and I’ve learned some­thing dif­fer­ent from all of them, but Todd… he’s just incred­i­ble. He’s so well pre­pared and pays so much atten­tion to every detail. You know some­times you watch movies and it feels like the actors are all in a dif­fer­ent movie? With Todd, he makes it so clear what movie you’re going to be in and the space you’re going to be in. At the end of the day, as an actor you’re ulti­mate­ly at the mer­cy of the direc­tor. I felt very safe in Todd’s world.”

When asked about her own process, Mara baulks. ​“I don’t have a process. I mean, I like to do a lot of research and read­ing for each part, but I find that stuff so bor­ing to talk about. Like, who wants to hear about that, real­ly?” It’s a per­fect­ly fair shut­down, but at this point you begin to won­der to what extent Mara has earned her rep­u­ta­tion for being coy and guard­ed in inter­views. Then, with her very next breath, she derails that train of thought. ​“I find it very hard to be vul­ner­a­ble, even in front of the peo­ple that I love. With Todd, he made it very easy. Therese is a very vul­ner­a­ble char­ac­ter and Todd cre­at­ed a space where I felt com­fort­able show­ing that side of myself, which is some­thing I’d nev­er nor­mal­ly feel. You want­ed to do that for him.” So what is it pre­cise­ly about Haynes’ approach to sto­ry­telling that res­onat­ed with Mara? ​“He just under­stands women,” she explains. ​“I don’t under­stand it – he’s just so bril­liant at telling female sto­ries. Because he loves and respects women so much it cre­at­ed a safe envi­ron­ment for us to tell a real­ly inti­mate and del­i­cate sto­ry. It would have been a very dif­fer­ent expe­ri­ence with some­one who isn’t as sen­si­tive and in-tune as Todd.”

It’s fas­ci­nat­ing that Mara is so keen to dis­cuss Haynes’ method above her own, not least because self-aggran­dis­ing con­ver­sa­tions about ​“the craft” are so com­mon when engag­ing with Hollywood’s elite, but most­ly because it’s rare to meet such an unaf­fect­ed young actor, some­one who recog­nis­es the need to adapt to a giv­en director’s process. This under­stand­ing is part of what makes Mara a great actor, and pre­sum­ably it’s been a fac­tor in her find­ing favour with the likes of David Finch­er, Steven Soder­bergh and Ter­rence Mal­ick, whose as yet unti­tled 2016 project is cur­rent­ly in post production.

Like a lot of actors, Mara is her own worst crit­ic and a stick­ler for detail, but because so much of what she does is instinc­tu­al she doesn’t see the ben­e­fit in ret­ro­spec­tive­ly obsess­ing over her work. (As Jesse Eisen­berg says to Mara in The Social Net­work, ​“There’s a dif­fer­ence between being obsessed and being moti­vat­ed.”) ​“I always watch myself back at least once,” she reveals, ​“but usu­al­ly just out of respect for the film­mak­er. Before the Cannes pre­mière [of Car­ol], Todd had been try­ing to get me to watch the film for six months and I kept putting it off. It’s one of those things where you end up notic­ing all the lit­tle flaws and mis­takes that prob­a­bly no one else notices but seem huge to me. It’s like, I have a tee­ny-tiny snag­gle­tooth that sticks out a lit­tle bit, which to me is a flaw. But there’s always two ways of look­ing at things, and so I’ve learned to acknowl­edge the fact that it also gives my face char­ac­ter. Now I love my lit­tle snaggletooth.”

You won’t see Mara play the ingénue or the inno­cent nar­ra­tor, or any out­mod­ed female arche­type for that mat­ter. She sim­ply has no inter­est in play­ing those types of char­ac­ters. Yet while Mara has undoubt­ed­ly come a long way in the last five years, the same can’t quite be said of the indus­try. It’s a prob­lem she’s acute­ly aware of. ​“When I was start­ing out it was real­ly frus­trat­ing because it felt like all the parts out there were ​‘the girl­friend’ or what­ev­er. There was no real per­son behind most of those char­ac­ters. In the last five years that’s changed and I’ve had the oppor­tu­ni­ty to play a range of well-realised char­ac­ters. But a lot of the time it feels like I’m read­ing the best female dia­logue out there. There have been years where there’s been noth­ing that’s inter­est­ed me. You get scripts through and the dia­logue is just hor­ri­ble. It’s so weird. Peo­ple just don’t know how to write female dia­logue. So many men are afraid of writ­ing female dia­logue. We’re not that dif­fer­ent, you know, we’re all human. But it’s chang­ing. There are a lot more female writ­ers and I sin­cere­ly hope that there will be a lot more female direc­tors in the future as well. The fact that we’re even hav­ing this con­ver­sa­tion, that’s a start.”

Car­ol is released in the UK 27 November.