Rooney Mara, one of Hollywood's leading ladies, has always let her work speak for itself.
She isn't on social media and offers few press interviews.
Since Mara is generally a private person, there's a lot about her that fans might not
know.
Here's the untold truth of Joaquin Phoenix's fiancee, Rooney Mara.
Mara first worked with Phoenix on the set of 2013's Her.
The movie follows a man who falls in love with a computer operating system, and Mara
portrayed Phoenix's ex-wife in the movie.
Phoenix opened up about meeting Mara to Vanity Fair in a 2019 interview, telling the magazine,
"She's the only girl I ever looked up on the internet.
We were just friends, email friends.
I'd never done that.
Never looked up a girl online."
During filming, however, Phoenix also said he thought Mara despised him, but later learned
she was just shy.
And she actually liked him, too.
The actors reunited in a professional setting to shoot Mary Magdalene, in which Mara played
the title role, while Phoenix portrayed Jesus.
According to W magazine, Mara and Phoenix were just friends during production, but they
started dating after the film wrapped.
While dating rumors had begun to swirl on the set of Mary Magdalene, it wasn't until
the Cannes Film Festival in 2017 that they revealed their romance to the world.
After three years of dating, the couple got engaged in 2019, according to Us Weekly.
Mara and her family have strong connections to the National Football League.
Her father's family founded the team the New York Giants, and her mother's family founded
the Pittsburgh Steelers, as noted by Vogue.
Though football runs in her blood, Mara chose theater over sports.
In 2015, Mara told comedian Seth Meyers on his late-night show that she was frequently
at football games as a child, despite not always wanting to be there.
"Did you like going to games, I'm assuming you went to games when you were younger…"
"I did, I hated it."
Mara explained that she didn't hate the actual games, she hated the way she looked compared
to the rest of the crowd.
"Because we always would go after church, and I'd have to wear tights and a little outfit
and everyone else is in their sweatpants."
In an interview with Vogue, Mara credited her mom for introducing her and her sister
to old black and white movies at a young age.
This early education prompted a growing Mara to audition and get cast as a crow in a community
production of The Wizard of Oz, which afterwards led her to realize she may not be fit for
stage acting.
She told Vogue,
"I was so horrified to be out in front of everyone that I couldn't remember my one little
line...And that was the end of my thespian career."
Even in 2013, Mara said she still hadn't overcome her fear of live performing.
While she said she'd like to do a play someday, she admitted that being on stage terrifies
her.
She even compared a first day on set to, quote, "the first week of school [with] new people,"
and added,
"I always get nervous in the beginning.
But you know, it's so intimate [that] you get used to it."
Mara began auditioning for roles at 18 years old, and, like many now-successful actors
and actresses, she appeared as a guest on Law & Order: SVU early on in her career.
She told HuffPost about her 2006 episode, saying,
"It couldn't have been more exciting for me.
It's an experience I hold very dear to my heart."
"You hate fat people, don't you?"
"No, I don't mind them."
While now she sticks to, quote, "dark, cerebral, deeply romantic" films, back then, Mara auditioned
for everything which wasn't actually easy for her to do.
She told Vogue,
"Auditioning is like going on a job interview.
You have to wear a certain outfit and behave a certain way and play the game a little bit,
and I'm just not good at that.
I'm really not."
Later on, Mara appeared in a couple of indie films like Youth in Revolt before trying her
hand at horror with 2010's remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street, which she later told the HuffPost
was a tough movie to make.
She explained,
"I didn't love the experience, but I would never take it back because I feel like I learned
something from it and it brought me to my next job."
Mara's short but sweet scene-stealing role in 2010's The Social Network, which was directed
by David Fincher, was a turning point in her acting career.
In the film's opening, Mara plays a whip-smart fictional character who, at a college bar,
dumps the inventor of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, played by Jesse Eisenberg.
That small role and the ones leading up to it landed her the lead role in The Girl with
the Dragon Tattoo, also directed by Fincher.
Mara, a relative unknown in the movie world at that point, reportedly beat out actresses
like Ellen Page and Carey Mulligan for the role in the English-language film adaptation
of the first in the Millennium Trilogy book series, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, as
reported by IndieWire.
Mara later told Variety,
"[After The Social Network], I was re-inspired to give it my all."
And that she did.
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo star spent more than a year with character Lisbeth Salander,
who takes potent revenge on the man who brutally assaults her.
Mara told Parade,
"I think the thing that makes her such a compelling character is that you do sort of fall instantly
in love with her, but at the same time you don't always agree with what she's doing and
you also question her and you get frustrated by her.
She's just an incredibly multi-layered character."
And Mara knew she wanted to play her as authentically as possible right down to the haircut and
piercings.
In the book series, the heroine is especially full of piercings.
Mara got multiple piercings on her face and body, including in her eyebrow and right nipple.
Fake piercings were an option, but apparently not for the committed actress.
She told Allure the piercings helped her get into character and not feel like she was in
costume, adding,
"And I thought, she has it in the book, and she should have it [in the movie]."
She also appears in the buff quite often in the film, something Mara prepared for by kickboxing,
which helped her feel more confident when it came to taking her clothes off, according
to Parade.
Mara was shy growing up, and she still considers herself to be shy at times.
She told The New York Times,
"In high school, people thought I was stuck-up because I didn't talk to anyone.
It was just because I was shy and scared, but I think because I'm super self-possessed
that it doesn't come across as scared so much as stuck-up."
She told The Guardian she's been "guarded" since she was 3 years old, though she's not
sure why that is.
She shared,
"I come from such a huge family, so maybe it's that.
Maybe it comes from going to Christmas and having 30 people all in your face at once."
Even now as an adult, the actress can find public appearances to be overwhelming.
In 2013, she told Vogue,
"For Dragon Tattoo, I had eight different premieres, this many different photo calls.
It's a lot to plan for.
It's not like you can just show up."
Like in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Mara wasn't opposed to stripping down when it came
to her role in 2015's Carol, for which she later went on to receive an Oscar nomination
for best supporting actress.
Interestingly, Mara initially declined a part in the film.
She told The Hollywood Reporter,
"I had done four films in a row and was exhausted.
I read it and thought it was beautiful and was dying to work with Cate Blanchett but
I didn't think I could do it.
I didn't think I'd be good in it."
After completing four more films and then taking a year off to recover, according to
The New York Times, the Carol script fell on Mara's lap again, and that time she said
yes.
When it came to taking her clothes off with her formidable co-star, whose character plays
an upper middle-class housewife in 1950s New York City who falls for Mara's young department
store clerk character, Mara told E! News,
"I think doing a love scene can be more or less comfortable but that's just depending
on what character you're playing and who you're doing it with.
I felt very comfortable around Cate."
While Mara is known by Rooney thanks to her work in a number of projects, that isn't actually
her first name.
Mara was born Patricia Rooney Mara, and she went by "Tricia" throughout her adolescence,
as she told Paper magazine in a 2010 interview.
It wasn't until her acting career started taking off that she decided to toss Patricia
altogether and go by Rooney, her middle name and her mom's maiden name, while keeping Mara
as her last name.
She told the publication,
"I never really liked my first name.
I never felt like a Tricia.
And Rooney is more memorable."
She went by the name Tricia Mara until the making of indie flick Tanner Hall.
After the film premiered, it brought the new Rooney Mara several awards, including a Rising
Star award at the 2009 Hamptons International Film Festival.
Mara told Vogue in 2013 that she hates seeing her own movies, and she sometimes avoids the
experience unless necessary, as she prefers to watch them by herself in a public theater.
She explained,
"Anytime I see anything I've done, I wish that it had gone differently."
She noted that she watched The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo in a theater near Manhattan's
Union Square with the public.
While she wanted to go alone, her boyfriend at the time insisted he join her.
Mara added,
"He was wise to come with me because if anyone had recognized me, I would have been so embarrassed."
Though she's known as an actress, Mara once had aspirations of becoming a singer.
Growing up watching Broadway musicals like Rent and Les Misérables captivated a young
Mara.
She told Vogue,
"That's actually why I started acting.
Just because I can't really sing, so that was like my only way into that world that
I love."
A lover of all things musical theater, Mara revealed in a 2013 interview with The Mirror
that she learned how to ballroom dance.
She said,
"I'm a crazy dancer when I'm alone but a little too shy to let it come out in public.
But let me tell you, it's going to come out!"
She's even danced in some of her movie roles, trying her hand at ballroom dancing in Tanner
Hall, and in Terrence Malick's 2017 project Song to Song, in which Mara starred alongside
Ryan Gosling.
Actress Kate Mara had been acting for years before her sister, Rooney, became an actress.
On Popcorn with Peter Travers, Kate admitted that she didn't have any acting friends before
her sister came along which was about six or seven years later.
"So when she became an actor, we actually lived together in my apartment for the first
year or two."
During that time, the sisters bonded over their auditions and supported each other when
their movies didn't do well.
In a 2017 interview with Vogue, Rooney said her sister has a "better personality" than
her, adding,
"People like her more."
Unlike her sister, who knew she wanted to be an actress by age 10, Rooney told the magazine
she was slower to jump on the acting train.
She added,
"Maybe because I was a contrarian, I wanted to go to school and not be a child actor."
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