While Rooney Mara put herself on the map with her performance in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, the prior year she starred in both The Social Network and the Nightmare on Elm Street remake. Those received totally different responses, with fans and critics slamming Samuel Bayer's take on horror icon Freddy Krueger (who was played by Watchmen star Jackie Earle Haley).
During a recent interview on the LaunchLeft podcast (via FearHQ.com), the actress looked back on the experience of making the movie and said it was actually David Fincher who restored her faith in acting after what sounds like a deeply unpleasant time working on the horror project.
"A few years before ['The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo'], I had done a 'Nightmare on Elm Street' remake, which was not a good experience," Mara recalls. "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."
"So after making that film, I kind of decided, 'Ok, I’m just not going to act anymore unless it’s something that I feel that way about.'"
The Social Network was, of course, helmed by Fincher and it was working on that movie which ultimately led to Mara nabbing the lead role in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. However, the filmmaker actually had a fight on his hands when it came to casting her as Mark Zuckerberg's ex-girlfriend.
"He had to fight really hard for me to get the part because the studio didn’t want me for it," the actress says. "It was a definite real turning point in my life and my career."
As for their next collaboration, which earned Mara an Oscar nomination, she says: "David really took me under his wing. He 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."
While Mara doesn't specify what was so bad about the time she spent working on Nightmare on Elm Street, it must have been pretty foul for her to reconsider her acting career. The fact she has to be careful about what she says is, in itself, pretty telling, and we do wonder whether more will now be revealed.
Regardless, we're glad she was able to overcome those issues, anyway, and we're sure the experience of working with Fincher more than made up for her brief spell as part of the iconic horror franchise.