Aside from the visceral and cinematic nature of the material, Fincher was also intrigued by the villains in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. They were not politicians or dictators—instead, the top bad guys are big businessmen. “Fascism has worked its way out of politics,” Fincher said, “and gone into high finance. Today Woodward and Bernstein would be investigating corruption in the financial arena. I was interested in that. And, of course, the girl.”
“Before I read the book, I didn’t think I could do it,” Mara said. She was calling me from Zurich, where the production moved in early December. “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.”
The offspring of two football dynasties—the Rooneys (who own the Pittsburgh Steelers) and the Maras (who own the New York Giants)—Mara has an innate refinement, and there was some concern that she would not jibe with the character of Lisbeth Salander. “I wanted her from the beginning,” Fincher stated. “Rooney may be a trust-fund baby from football royalty, but she’s levelheaded and hardworking. It’s so odd how who people are comes out in auditions. We didn’t make it easy for Rooney, and there was no way to dissuade her.”
Fincher saw much more famous actresses: Natalie Portman had just finished three movies back-to-back and was exhausted; Scarlett Johansson was too sexy (“Marilyn on a bike,” Fincher said); and others, like Jennifer Lawrence, were too tall. “The studio pressures you to pick a name,” Fincher said. “All walks of life want the path of least resistance.” Rudin disagreed. “The studio never wanted a star,” he told me. “But it was David’s idea to build a Lisbeth Salander vessel for your fantasies.” Toward that end Fincher considered unorthodox choices: Yo-Landi Vi$$er, the lead singer of South African punk band Die Antwoord; Sophie Lowe, an unknown from Australia; Katie Jarvis, who was discovered at a train station in the UK and caused a sensation in the movie Fish Tank. “It was hard,” Fincher recalled. “We had five or six girls audition with the rape scene. The girls had to kick a dildo up his ass. That’s Salander’s big scene, and we had to see if they could do it.”
Mara didn’t blink. “David added the rape scene at the last minute, and I said, ‘Ohmigod! They must be really serious.’ They did one test, then another a week later. They shot me in the subway in L.A. in full hair and makeup with a motorcycle. Every day they had a new request. On a Monday morning, David called me in, and I said, ‘What do you want me to do to my hair now?’ I was at the end of my rope. He told me I had the part. I hadn’t even read the script yet.”
