Entertainment
Rooney Mara says she almost quit acting after ‘not a great experience’ starring in A Nightmare on Elm Street reboot-Tori Brazier-Entertainment – Metro
The actress said it taught her how to pick her roles going foward, if she decided to act again.
The actress may not ever have had her breakthrough in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (Picture: Axelle/Bauer-Griffin/FilmMagic)
Rooney Mara has revealed that she almost quit acting after working on the A Nightmare on Elm Street remake in 2010, which she described as ‘not a great experience’.
The Oscar-nominated actress, who is picky when it comes to her roles, is set to star in Women Talking alongside Claire Foy and Jessie Buckley, and the film about an isolated religious community has been generating awards buzz.
Prior to this, she was in Nightmare Alley in 2021 but took a three-year beak before then.
The 37-year-old has now explained that it was her experience on A Nightmare on Elm Street in the earlier stages of her career that made her re-evaluate her relationship with acting and the jobs she chose to do.
‘A few years before [The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo], I had done a Nightmare on Elm Street remake, which was not a great experience,’ she explained.
‘I have to be careful with what I say and how I talk about it. It wasn’t the best experience making it and I kind of got to this place, that I still live in, that I don’t want to act unless I’m doing stuff that I feel like I have to do.
Mara’s first major role came in the 2010 remake (Picture: New Line)
She said it inspired her to only act when she ‘feels like I have to’ (Picture: New Line/Kobal/Shutterstock)
‘So after making that film, I decided, “OK, I’m just not going to act anymore unless it’s something that I feel that way about”,’ she said on the Launch Left podcast with her partner’s sister, Rain Phoenix.
Mara, who has been tapped to play Audrey Hepburn in an upcoming biopic, starred as Nancy Holbrook in the thriller alongside Kyle Gallner, Thomas Dekker, Kellan Lutz and Jackie Earle Haley as Freddie Krueger.
The star then went on to reveal what an impact David Fincher had on her career, as her next audition was for the small part of Mark Zuckerberg’s (Jesse Eisenberg) ex-girlfriend Erica in The Social Network, which she was convinced by due to her ‘amazing scene’.
Mara also praised director Dvid Fincher for being ‘a mentor’ (Picture: Jon Kopaloff/Getty Images)
Her next job would be under director Fincher again for her breakout role in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, which she revealed he didn’t initially want her to audition for ‘because he thought I wasn’t right for it based on what I did in The Social Network’.
She recalled: ‘I kind of insisted that they put me on tape anyway, and so I did, and then he had to fight really hard for me to get the part because the studio didn’t want me for it. It was a definite real turning point in my life and my career.’
Mara also said that the director ‘really took me under his wing’ and ‘became my mentor in a lot of ways’.
‘He took such great care to make sure that I knew that I had a voice and that my opinion meant something. He constantly was empowering me, which I think really affected the rest of my choices thereafter,’ she said.
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Mara has been in a relationship with Joker star Joaquin Phoenix since 2016.
The couple have acted opposite one another in Her, Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot and Mary Magdalene.
They share a son, River Lee, named after Phoenix’s late brother and born in August 2020.
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