Rooney Mara is best known for her roles in The Girl With A Dragon Tattoo or Carol, but lately, after years of building up her reputation, Mara is focusing more on small indie films and lots of travel.
Vogue chose Mara as their October cover person, and sat down with her to discuss her life and upcoming films. The 32-year-old actress has been vegetarian most of her life and vegan for the past six, for ethical reasons, and is trying to cut leather out of her wardrobe as well. The Vogue article makes it feel like Mara is in constant motion, living out of suitcases (she recently sold her New York City apartment and is in the process of selling her house in Los Angeles). Mara founded a charity in Nairobi’s Kibera slum after volunteering in college, and still travels back to check in with the kids in the charity and to explore more that she hasn’t seen.
The actress, born into a family that owned two NFL teams (her father’s family founded the New York Giants and her mother’s the Pittsburgh Steelers), has a large travel bucket list. Some of the roles she has had in films have helped her get there; she was an aid worker in Stephen Daldry’s movie Trash, which was filmed in Brazil.
Roles like that — “emotionally demanding indie projects” instead of big studio films — is what Mara is striving for, writes Vogue. She makes a point to avoid the “girlfriend or wife” roles that many young female actresses are thrust into. Why is she doing this? Vogue writes that she is chasing an immersive experience — she told the magazine she needs to “be feeling like this is the truth of what’s really happening.” She doesn’t like to see herself on screen, for her, it is about the “experience of making a movie.”
Mara has two new films coming out soon. One is a new biopic about the late quadriplegic cartoonist John Callahan Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot. The second is what Vogue calls her “most daring part to date” — the title role in Mary Magdalene. She will be starring alongside Joaquin Phoenix as Christ (the two are rumored to be dating).
Mara is also developing a movie herself, based on the best-selling memoir A House in the Sky, about journalist Amanda Lindhout’s time being held hostage by militants in Somalia. Mara hopes the film will be made in 2018.
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