Rooney Mara, the star of David Fincher's Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Vogue Magazine November 2011

Rooney Mara, the star of David Fincher's upcoming Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, graces the cover of this month's Vogue with a profile by Contributing Editor Jonathan Van Meter.

The November issue hits newsstands nationwide October 25th, but the cover story is available now on Vogue.com:

It's approaching midnight, and the June sun is winking on the horizon, still hoping to conjure one last moment of spooky beauty for the good people of Stockholm. Rooney Mara, David Fincher, and I are walking home from a two-bottle-of-wine dinner at their favorite café, around the corner from Ingmar Bergman Plats. Both of them have been living in Sweden, on and off, since the previous summer, shooting one of the most anticipated movies in years: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. As we pass the Royal Dramatic Theatre, where Greta Garbo studied as a teenager, Mara points to the clock tower in Gamla Stan, silhouetted in the distance, and reminds Fincher that when it strikes twelve it will be exactly one year to the day since he first auditioned her to play the part of Lisbeth Salander, arguably the most coveted role for an actress since Scarlett O'Hara in Gone With the Wind (another film adaptation of a wildly popular book featuring a shrewd, complicated, difficult-to-love heroine capable of slaying a man).

"Really?" says Fincher. "A year ago tomorrow?" He shakes his head in disbelief and then fishes a vibrating phone out of his pocket: "Hello, Amy." It is the co-chairperson of Sony Pictures, Amy Pascal, the studio head who, if this movie takes off, will surely get credit for having greenlighted the first truly adult franchise to come out of Hollywood since the early seventies, when movies like The Exorcist--not Twilight--were winning the terrified hearts of audiences everywhere.

photographed by Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott