Rooney Mara

[Armani]

ROONEY MARA Leaves Gelson’s Market in Los Angeles 07/04/2017

credit: hawtcelebs

 

[Yohji]

Empire Magazine August 2017.

tumblr.com/feo-oliau, tumblr.com/paul-stine​

 

[Benn98]

Can't wait for her hair to grow out, this cut is not photographing well at all.

 

[liaa]

^Yes, i also think she looks prettier with long hair.

 

[t-rex]

She'd lok better if they didn't make her eyebrows so thick

 

[fincherism]

I actually like how her hair looks--in the photoshoot. Haven't really been impressed with the styling in candids or events.

 

[Armani]

ROONEY MARA Out in Los Angeles 07/18/2017

credit: hawtcelebs

 

[Armani]

ROONEY MARA Arrives at LAX Airport in Los Angeles 07/27/2017

credit: hawtcelebs

 

[faimka]

Arrives at a Meeting in Los Angeles 08/15/2017

hawtcelebs.com

 

[Benn98]

Love that cropped jumper, actually something I could see myself getting as well.

 

[HeatherAnne]

Los Angeles in August and in addition to wearing a sweater you need a long-sleeve flannel shirt tied around your waist, because?? Celebrities are too much sometimes.

 

[jexxica]

badpostrooney twitter​

 

[jexxica]

Rooney Mara photographed by Anne Leibovitz for the cover of "VOGUE" magazine (October, 2017)

badpostrooney twitter​

 

[tapenerd]

Ugh, that's an awful cover.

 

[zigzag]

I'm always intrigued by Rooney's casual style even though I don't always like it. Does anyone know where she shops or what designers she favors?

 

[Yohji]

Vogue October 2017 by Annie Leibovitz

Rooney Mara on Her Challenging New Role—And Why She Doesn’t Care What Other People Think

“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, **** you! Watch me be wide-eyed and innocent!”

A 37,000-foot view of Mara’s childhood reveals how little of it seems to carry forward into her adult self. There’s the famous football dynasty: Her father’s family founded the New York Giants, and her mother’s, the Rooneys, founded the Pittsburgh Steelers. Nothing could seem more distant from Mara’s narrow-shouldered hipster frame. There’s her early-teenage passion for horror films, a genre that she says she now loathes. And, of course, there’s what she describes as her shy, distrustful demeanor as a child, so unlike that of her older sister, Kate, also an actress. “She has a better personality than I do,” Rooney says, deadpan. “People like her more.” When they were growing up, Kate and their cousins would put on dance shows around the house, but Rooney (then called Tricia) was so timorous that she could never do anything except press stop and play on their cassette player.

“Kate knew definitively that she wanted to be on Broadway and do music and acting by age ten,” Rooney explains. “Maybe because I was a contrarian, I wanted to go to school and not be a child actor.” Her essential taste in films has never changed—“dark, cerebral, deeply romantic, goth, weird”—but at eighteen and nineteen she tried out for everything. “Auditioning is like going on a job interview. You have to wear a certain outfit and behave a certain way and play the game a little bit, and I’m just not good at that. I’m really not,” she says. She hates small talk. “I either want no conversation or ‘Let’s talk about your failing marriage,’ ” she says.

The roles came slowly at first; it wasn’t until David Fincher cast her as the lead in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, after working with her in The Social Network, that she got her break. And yet, where many actresses would use such a role as an entrée into Hollywood, Mara has taken a different path. Following The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, she’s made relatively few big studio films, building out her reputation instead in emotionally demanding indie proj*ects. There was her performance as a Texan outlaw turned young mother in Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, and as an aid worker in Rio de Janeiro in Stephen Daldry’s Trash. Mara makes a point of avoiding the “girlfriend or wife” roles that young actresses are often slotted into, but she’s been known to take interesting iterations: as a murderous sleepwalker in Side Effects, as the ex of a man in love with his operating system in Her, and, of course, as the department-store waif who falls in love with an older woman in Carol. Earlier this year, she starred with Robert Redford in the philosophical sci-fi thriller The Discovery, made by her own former boyfriend of several years, Charlie McDowell.

All of this is a fittingly broad range for a woman who prefers to move through the world less like a movie star than like a student on a gap year, hopping planes and living out of carry-ons. A few years ago, while shooting Trash in Brazil, she insisted on exploring the local favelas alone. It wasn’t her first time in a struggling foreign quarter: After spending a college summer in a volunteer program in Nairobi’s Kibera slum, one of the largest in the world, Mara founded a charity to administer care and services to children there. She has a lengthy bucket list of places she hopes to visit—India, Nepal, Bhutan, parts of South America—but returns to Africa from time to time, both to check in with kids in her charity and to take in what she hasn’t seen before.

Read more: https://www.vogue.com/article/rooney-mara-vogue-october-issue-2017-cover

vogue.com
​

 

[Yohji]

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

anothermag.com

 

[jexxica]

HQs

starity.hu

 

[Armani]

ROONEY MARA Arrives at a Gym in West Hollywood 09/20/2017

credit: hawtcelebs

 

[eugenius]

She looks like she really, really, really, really, really, really, really hated doing that photoshoot for Vogue.