Here's the first official look at
Rooney Mara as tough bisexual computer hacker Lisbeth Salander in
David Fincher's The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo that debuted at
W Magazine and has just hit online, and well, it's certainly eye-catching. A head-turner, absolutely. WOW. I was pretty vocal about how timid, how boring & how out of her depth Mara was in the
A Nightmare On Elm Street remake but she was perfectly fine in her brief but pivotal role as Mark Zuckerberg's ex-girlfriend in
The Social Network and it's amazing to look at what Fincher has done with her here. It's a full transformation... she's almost unrecognizable. She now looks totally right for the part - completely bad-ass and confident with it - surely die-hard Stieg Larsson fans are letting out of a sigh of relief? More pics after the jump;
Interestingly, Mara herself was unconvinced about her own ability to play the part;
Before I read the book, I didnt think I could do it... I locked myself in a room for a week and read all three books, and decided I really wanted to be Lisbeth. But I thought I had no shot at it.
Fincher says;
We had five or six girls audition with the rape scene. The girls had to kick a dildo up his ass. Thats Salanders big scene, and we had to see if they could do it.
Of those five or six girls were
Scarlett Johansson who Fincher says was "too sexy" for the part like Marilyn on a bike and
Jennifer Lawrence who was simply too tall. Fincher doesn't reveal the rest of the names who we heard were close to the part such as
Carey Mulligan, Ellen Page (who picked up her own film camera and shot a screen test, she was that desperate for the part) and
Natalie Portman (who tried to buy the rights to the series before Paramount).
The first of late Swedish author Stieg Larsson's crime thriller trilogy, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo follows "the mystery surrounding the long-unsolved disappearance of an heiress. A journalist recently dinged by a libel case and a young female hacker try to resolve it, stirring up bundles of personal and industrial corruption along the way". Mara is the hacker,
Daniel Craig the journalist with a supporting cast that includes;
Stellan Skarsgard, Robin Wright, Christopher Plummer, Joely Richardson, Steven Berkoff, David Dencik and
Alexandra Daddario. The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo will continue filming for a few more months before Fincher edits his footage for a Dec. 21st, 2011 release. Excitedly, and we didn't have time to mention it last week, The Social Network's
Trent Reznor and
Atticus Ross are back to score.