Rooney Mara is impossible to pin down. The 41-year-old, raised in Bedford, just north of New York City, has been a delicate and ethereal presence on our screens for the past two decades. She’s compelling in straight-forward dramas (just watch her in Garth Davis’s Dev Patel-led ), but it’s when the double Oscar nominee drifts into stranger territory that she really shines: off-kilter ghost stories, murky mysteries and strange biblical epics. And her latest release might just be her weirdest yet – Werner Herzog’s , in which she and her real-life sister, Kate Mara, are set to play codependent twins living on the fringes of society.
Ahead of the movie’s Venice Film Festival premiere, we celebrate Rooney Mara’s most striking performances so far.
At 25, Mara came to prominence as Erica Albright, the long-suffering (and fictional) girlfriend of Jesse Eisenberg’s insufferable Mark Zuckerberg in David Fincher’s eerily prescient drama about the creation of Facebook. She has only a handful of scenes, but makes a big impression, becoming the film’s level-headed moral centre. She is where the story begins, and where it ends.
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011)
After Noomi Rapace (2009’s Swedish-language The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) and before Claire Foy (2018’s The Girl in the Spider’s Web), Mara gave us her take on the tough-as-nails Lisbeth Salander, and swiftly earned her first Oscar nomination. In David Fincher’s icy thriller, opposite Daniel Craig’s investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist, she’s a force to be reckoned with – her bleached brows, piercings and raven-black mohawk a sly warning to those who continue to underestimate her.
This cult classic from Todd Haynes is a true two-hander: Cate Blanchett, as the titular glamorous 1950s housewife, is the film’s glittering nucleus, but it wouldn’t work without Mara’s gentle Therese, the shop girl and aspiring photographer who is quietly enthralled by her. Watchful and pained behind the lens of her camera, and then simmering with unfulfilled desire, she is wonderful, taking Cannes’s Best Actress prize (jointly with Emmanuelle Bercot for ), plus Oscar, Golden Globe, SAG, BAFTA and Critics’ Choice Award nods.
A Ghost Story (2017)
Everyone remembers that excruciatingly long pie eating scene, but Mara is brilliant throughout David Lowery’s surreal meditation on grief. When her character, an unnamed woman, loses her husband (Casey Affleck) – who then, er, appears as a ghost, with a sheet over his head – her devastation manifests in unexpected ways. Her stillness and subtlety, not to mention her total commitment, are the reasons why this wacky drama is able to land its emotional beats.
Alongside her husband, Joaquin Phoenix – who is here a gruff, grizzled Jesus – Mara brings a solemn piety and sweeping intensity to the legendary disciple. Garth Davis’s grand biblical saga is divisive to say the least, but there’s no denying her ambition in taking this big, bold swing.
Each central figure responds differently to the unthinkable trauma inflicted upon them in Sarah Polley’s horrifying tragedy, the tale of a group of women in a Mennonite colony who realise that monstrous crimes have been committed against them. Accompanied by Claire Foy’s rageful Salome and Jessie Buckley’s sceptical Mariche, Mara is the soft, sweet-natured Ona, relentlessly hopeful but also clear-eyed about the ways of the world. Another standout turn in a career full of them.