Rooney Mara tries to backpedal on awful, stupid Law & Order comments

Last week, one of our biggest stories was about Rooney Mara’s Allure cover profile, in which Rooney talked smack about her early roles. She had unkind words for her first professional acting job in a 2006 episode of Law & Order: SVU. Her exact words:

“It was so awful. So stupid. People are obsessed with that show. I don’t get it. Me and my boyfriend—although I don’t look old enough to have a boyfriend—went and beat up these fat people, and at the end of the show you find out that I used to be obese and I hate fat people. It’s ridiculous. Who would ever do that? Who would beat someone up because they’re fat? And as retribution, they sodomized her. I mean, I’ve been sodomized since the beginning of my career. I should have known then it would come full circle.”

[Allure via previous Celebitchy story]

It struck me at the time that I remembered Rooney mentioning something disparaging about SVU in another interview, but I didn’t think to look it up. Turns out, she also had a little SVU snipe in her Vogue interview as well, and this was months ago:

At nineteen, she began auditioning on the side. One of her first roles was on Law & Order: SVU, playing a girl who “hates fat people, and you find out in the end she used to be obese herself. It’s just too embarrassing.” After graduation, she moved to L.A., but pre-Fincher, her biggest role was in the disappointing 2010 reboot of the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise. Mara minces no words about the experience. “I hated it,” she says. “It left me thinking, If this is what is available to me, then I don’t necessarily want to be an actress. And then I got the script for The Social Network.”

[From Vogue]

As I’ve said before: Portrait of the Artist as a Smug Bitch. Anyway, someone must have told her to tone it down lest she get a reputation as The Next Gwyneth Paltrow. So Rooney tried to eat sh-t in a Huffington Post interview:

HuffPo: You’ve said — or at least I read — that you didn’t necessarily love your time during that “SVU” episode and some other shoots. So what was it about working with David Fincher on “Social Network” and now “Dragon Tattoo” that rekindled your passion?
Mara: First of all, the “SVU” thing — that’s just not true. That was my first job. It couldn’t have been more exciting for me. It’s an experience I hold very dear to my heart. People take things out of context, and that’s just not the case. I was more nervous doing that job than I was doing this job …

“Nightmare on Elm Street” [Mara starred in the 2010 remake of the horror film] was a really hard movie to make, and 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. I feel like every job I’ve ever had has led me to the next, and whether you like something or not, you always learn from it, and I think sometimes it’s good to do those jobs that weren’t necessarily easy to make, and you learn the most about yourself from those.

HuffPo: I immediately felt bad asking that question, because at this point, the story isn’t so much whether you liked those shoots, but what the press and the Internet harps on.
Mara: It’s really silly. People, especially with young girls, they feel the need to make them out to be a certain way, and I feel so grateful for any job I’ve ever gotten. I feel grateful for the student jobs I did, I feel grateful for being an extra in some of the things my sister did. I feel like every single job that I’ve done has shaped who I am and has led me to where I am now.
It’s hard to have to talk about yourself all the time and things are out of context, and whatever that quote was, I don’t know, but it’s certainly not what I meant. If anything, I didn’t mean that the storyline was ridiculous; I meant that humanity is ridiculous. I know that ‘Law & Order’ makes their episodes out of real things that are happening in the city, so to me, by “ridiculous” I meant that humanity is ridiculous. People are awful to one another; and to me, I find it ridiculous.

[From The Huffington Post]

“People take things out of context…” and “whatever that quote was, I don’t know, but it’s certainly not what I meant. If anything, I didn’t mean that the storyline was ridiculous; I meant that humanity is ridiculous…” Really? Is that really what she was bitching about in TWO interviews, months apart, both times disparaging her early jobs? Why is it always “blame someone else for taking your words at face value”? Why can’t it be “I’m sorry I said that. That was a dick thing to say. I love being a working actress, and I shouldn’t have bitched about my early jobs”?

Photos courtesy of WENN.

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