When David Fincher signed on to direct the American adaptation of Stieg Larsson’s “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” one of the biggest challenges was getting the casting right: Who would be his Lisbeth Salander? The heroine, a bisexual punk hacker, had already been brought to life in the Swedish version by Noomi Rapace, but her version — a Goth avenging angel with the face and figure of a grown woman — didn’t entirely fit the book’s descriptions. Here, a breakdown of Fincher’s construction of his Salander: Rooney Mara, a virtual unknown who’d played a small role in Fincher’s previous film, “The Social Network,” and won the part over contenders such as Natalie Portman and Scarlett Johansson.
HER FACE
“She was a natural redhead, but she dyed her hair raven black,” Larsson wrote in his book. “She looked as though she had just emerged from a weeklong orgy with a gang of hard rockers. She had a wide mouth, a small nose and high cheekbones that gave her an almost Asian look.”
To overhaul the girl-next-door appearance Mara sported in “The Social Network,” Fincher brought makeup expert Pat McGrath (who Vogue calls “the most influential makeup artist in the world”), rock hairstylist Danilo (from “America’s Next Top Model”) and costumer Trish Summerville, who has since launched a Salander-inspired line for H&M. As Summerville told Vogue, “We didn’t want her to be this girl who looks like a musician in a rock band. She’s real. A lot of the time she’s dirty. She wipes her nose on her sleeve.”
But Fincher needed more from his lead actress than just the ability to wear makeup — he needed to see if she could look like she’d “just emerged from a weeklong orgy.” During her audition period, Mara told Vogue that Fincher said, “Go out and get really, really drunk and come in the next morning so we can take pictures of you.” Mara says she complied. “Threw up all night!” she told the fashion mag.
HER TATTOO
In Larsson’s novel, Lisbeth Salander is “a pale, anorexic young woman who had hair as short as a fuse, and a pierced nose and eyebrows. She had a wasp tattoo about an inch long on her neck, a tattooed loop around the biceps of her left arm and another around her left ankle . . . she had a dragon tattoo on her left shoulder blade.”
Makeup artist Torsten Witte was charged with keeping Mara inked up. He worked with NYC-based Temptu Pro to create the ink transfers that made each tattoo look realistic. The production used as many as 100 transfers to so that the tats always looked fresh. The design for the titular dragon came from one of Fincher’s friends, Witte told W magazine, as the director was concerned that it might come out looking too Asian or cartoony.
HER NUDITY
Mara, who clearly spent extensive time with Larsson’s text, also told Allure that she had no choice but to be OK with being naked on screen. “Nudity is such a huge part of the character in the book, so I never thought twice about it. There was no time for hesitation. I didn’t have time to second-guess anything or be scared; I just showed up and was comfortable.”
The most surprising — and exacting — detail of Mara’s transformation? A merkin (or pubic wig) which reflected the novel’s statement that Salander is a natural redhead. “Well, you know, in the book she’s meant to have strawberry-blonde hair originally and she dyes it,” Mara told Metro New York, “so we had a special merkin made that was, you know, strawberry-blonde so that it would fit.”
HER PIERCINGS
The previously unpierced Mara had to get rings in her lip, nose and ears. Four in the latter. “Weirdly, that hurt the most,” she told Allure. She also took the initiative to get a more intimate piercing: a nipple ring. “She has it in the book, and she should have it [in the movie],” she told Allure. “It just felt like a good one to get — a necessary one to get.”
HER FIGURE
Writes Larsson: “She did not in fact have an eating disorder . . . she had simply been born thin, with slender bones that made her look girlish and fine-limbed with small hands, narrow wrists and childlike breasts. She was 24, but she sometimes looked fourteen. Her extreme slenderness would have made a career in modeling impossible, but with the right makeup her face could have put her on any billboard in the world.”
In her conversation with Vogue, Mara pointed out that Fincher’s version of Salander is more faithful to this description than the Swedish movie’s. “One of the things that makes our version that much more heartbreaking is that even though I am playing a 24-year-old, I look much younger. I look like a child,” she said.
In a conversation with Time Out London, co-star Daniel Craig commented on Mara’s look: ‘’When she puts the hoodie on and the leather jacket, she looks like a 14-year-old boy, she looks sexless. Which is perfect. The other side of it is that when she doesn’t have that on, she’s really sexy. That combination is absolutely true to the book.”
HER FASHION
Costume designer Trish Summerville assembled a mostly-black wardrobe for Salander that reflected her desire to both telegraph hostility to the world, and allow her to, as the designer put it in the Hollywood Reporter, “disappear into the shadows.” Much time was spent making sure her T-shirts, pants, skirts and leather jacket were authentically beat-up: “edged-out, lived-in and dirty,” Summerville told The Post. “She’s slouchy and she’s kind of hiding in her clothing.” Occasionally she actually lets her clothing speak for her: in one scene Salander wears a t-shirt emblazoned with the words “F – – k You, You F – – king F – – k.”