The Full Story: Rooney Mara for AnOther Magazine A/W17
An unsettling ability to morph into character has won Rooney Mara her pick of trailblazing directors. Deborah Orr talks to the actress about her upcoming roles and courting controversy.
— September 14, 2017 —
Photography by
Tim Walker
Styling by
Katie Shillingford
Text by
Deborah Orr
Someone once said that asking an actor about the film they were in was like asking a stylus about the record it played. That someone was me, and it’s not as cruel a comment as it sounds. The stylus, after all, is a precisely polished diamond, designed for optimum toughness and sensitivity. A poor stylus will always deliver sound of poor quality. But even a flawless stylus will fail to get into the groove without a complex network of technology and talent to provide infrastructure and support.
It’s still quite a cruel comment though, because it’s so unfair. A stylus can’t choose what record it plays. But an actor can choose what role they play. Very good actors, if they’re very good at other things too, things that also assist in the building of an excellent career, are given the power to choose their roles with great courage and discernment. Rooney Mara is one such actor, and in her new film, Una, she’s made one such choice.
Mara’s decision to star in Una is not the result of a great script being recommended by a shrewd agent. It’s the result of a trip that Mara made to the theatre with her mother in 2007, before she’d ever even had a professional acting role. The Maras went to the theatre a lot, Mara being one of those kids who loved musical theatre and saw Rent “like, ten times or something”. She used to go and see classic movie screenings with her mother too: Gone With the Wind, Bringing Up Baby, The Philadelphia Story, and “a ton of Katharine Hepburn films”. On this occasion, Mara had no idea what play her mother had booked. It was an off-Broadway production of Blackbird.
Blackbird is a much-lauded two-hander by the Scottish playwright David Harrower, which premiered at the Edinburgh International Festival in 2005, winning Best New Play at the CATS (Critics Awards for Theatre in Scotland). The following year, a London production picked up the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play and Blackbird has since been produced all over the world, from Stockholm to South Korea. The most recent Broadway production, last year, starring Michelle Williams and Jeff Daniels, won three Tony awards.
So, Blackbird’s pretty highly rated. In evidence for the defence on the stylus claim, I can offer that when I asked Mara why the play was called Blackbird, she said, “I feel like I looked it up at some point and I did know at some point but now I can’t remember.” I don’t know either, as it happens, and anyway, having met Mara once, I’m utterly besotted by her, so I won’t be defending the stylus metaphor any further. I’ve met many styluses in my life and I’ve not felt this way towards any of them. Not even the first.
Our meeting took place in the library of the Soho Hotel in London, where I was asked to wait for her. Mara rarely gives interviews, and even as I sat in the room I wondered if this one would actually take place. When, at more or less the appointed time, a young assistant turned up looking apprehensive, I feared there might be a last-minute cancellation. It was fairly discombobulating when the young assistant, small and slight, casual in black trousers and a black leather jacket, opened her mouth to reveal that she was in fact the film star herself.
It had been silly to expect to recognise Mara. She’s an actor who always looks exactly like the character she’s playing. It’s reasonable not to connect Lisbeth Salander in David Fincher’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo to Therese Belivet in Todd Haynes’ Carol. They’re different sorts of women, living in different times. But Mara looks like Catherine in the Spike Jonze sci-fi movie Her, like Emily in the Steven Soderbergh psychological thriller Side Effects, like Erica in the Fincher biopic The Social Network and, no doubt, like the young Rose McNulty in The Secret Scripture – the Jim Sheridan “mawkish slog”, in the Guardian’s oft-repeated phrase. (Though since The Secret Scripture was universally decreed to be awful, I haven’t seen it.) Recently, watching Garth Davis’ Lion, I was plagued by a sense of familiarity in The Girlfriend, but couldn’t quite place her. D’oh!
Nor can I place exactly what it is that makes Mara such a shape-shifter when her beauty seems so distinctive. In the Soho Hotel, having been mesmerised as I watched Una the day before, I wouldn’t have been able to spot her in a line-up. Mara confirms that she can step out of her hotel into central London, going wherever she pleases, sure in the knowledge that nobody will give her a second glance. She does it all the time. She could easily be mistaken for an 18-year-old ingénue. She’s 32.
While Mara saw Blackbird ten years ago, the opportunity to make the film came much more recently. She was talking to her sister, Kate, also an actor, during the filming of Carol. Mara mentioned how much she’d liked Blackbird, and “Kate said, ‘Oh my God, my friend is doing it and he’s desperate to meet you,’ and I was, like, ‘Great!’ And I didn’t realise she meant a movie at that point, so then I met with Benedict here, while I was shooting another film and we made it, like, a year later.” Benedict being Benedict Andrews, an Australian theatre and opera director who lives in Iceland. Una is his first film.
So, the role fell into Mara’s lap, guided there by a couple of family interventions, and the fact that the play had lingered in her mind for a long time. The latter isn’t that surprising. Blackbird is traumatic and emotionally intense, for the actors and audience alike. It invites the audience to think about their preconceptions about paedophilia – more accurately, their preconceptions about sex between adult men and underage but post-pubescent girls. If, like me, you’re happy to have seen the back of recent preconceptions – that very young women are “jailbait” or that schoolgirls make perfectly acceptable “groupies” – this is highly uncomfortable territory, of the kind Mara seems drawn to.
When I ask her about another of her upcoming starring roles, as Mary Magdalene, she seems reluctant to talk about it, but does admit that she was hooked from the start by “the story and the world and the message”. I ask her to tell me what those are.
“No.”
A little, tiny bit? When Mara starts, she can’t stop.
“We shot it in Sicily, and then other parts of Italy, and we would be outside all day, no bathrooms, in the middle of nowhere, and hills and mountains… There was nothing to hide behind. It was just you and nature and the other actors. It was really interesting and beautiful to work that way.
“I’d worked with Garth [Davis] before, who I love. He’s such a special human being. We worked together on Lion – that was another small girlfriend part – so I read the script and thought, ‘It’s such a beautiful story but I still don’t want to do it because it’s not the kind of part I’d do.’ But I’d heard good things about Garth, and thought I’d love to talk to him, so we got on the phone and within ten seconds I said, ‘Okay, I’ll do it.’ There was something about him that I could feel was special, and within the first 30 seconds of our conversation he brought up Gena Rowlands and Cassavetes and A Woman Under the Influence,” she explains. “I just knew we were going to work together again, so I ended up saying yes to Lion, and then a few months after we wrapped he emailed me and asked, ‘How do you feel about Mary Magdalene?’ And I wrote back, ‘Why? **** you!’”
“He flew out to talk to me about it and I was really resistant. Then the second he said it, I was like, ‘**** you, because I know I’m going to do this but I don’t want to. Don’t make me do this.’ You know, I went to Catholic school, I grew up in a very...” she pauses to correct herself, “in a pretty religious family, so it was loaded for me and I didn’t really want to do a religious film. Then he said, ‘We’re not making a religious film. Do you think I would make a religious film?’ You know, Garth’s not a religious person but he’s one of the most spiritual people I’ve ever met. Because of the years of Catholic school I had a different idea of what it would be, but he spoke about it in such a way that I was fascinated with the story and the world and the message.
“It takes place over the span of a year, maybe. I mean, talk about feminism; I think it’s the most feminist movie I’ve done. What’s the first thing you think of when you hear the name Mary Magdalene? You think of a wh*re, right? She wasn’t a wh*re, which even I didn’t know, and I went to Catholic school, and I realised that’s the first thing I think of, too – a prostitute.”
Well, there are only two ways of being a woman in the Catholic Church, and that’s virgin or wh*re.
“You said that, not me. But yes, it was just amazing; everyone I talk to says, ‘Oh, she was the prostitute.’ I’m like, ‘No! She was one of the apostles!’ She was the only female disciple, and she was chosen by him to be his witness. Yet in our society she’s known as the wh*re, and Peter and Paul and all the other disciples have churches dedicated to them all around the world, and Judas was there, but she was the only other one that was present. She risked her life to witness his death. So it’s just amazing to me that she’s ‘the wh*re’.”
It’s almost as if the Catholic Church is a bit patriarchal?
“Yes. But it’s not alone in that. Most of society is. And maybe that was what was attractive about the film challenging...”
Religious patriarchy?
“Yes. But that really didn’t hit me until we were shooting. It was the day of the presidential election. I really don’t want to talk about politics at all, no desire to. But it was the morning of the election and I was so excited, because there we were making this really feminist film, and then, you know…”
Trump.
“It was disheartening,” says Mara. “I remember we were on set that day and it was freezing cold and everyone was in disbelief… And maybe a few weeks before, something came out from the Catholic Church that women were never going to be allowed to be priests. Something like that. I was thinking, ‘Really?’ It was just amazing to me. I realised what a bubble I live in.”
Read more:
http://www.anothermag.com/fashion-b...-story-rooney-mara-for-another-magazine-a-w17
