After months of scouring the planet for the right actress to portray Lisbeth Salander, the hacker-heroine of Stieg Larsson’s best-selling Millennium Trilogy, Sony Pictures Entertainment and director David Fincher have chosen Rooney Mara (A Nightmare On Elm Street) to take on the role in The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. The film has had everyone from Carey Mulligan to Natalie Portman screen testing (We called her the front-runner when she was rumored for the role on July 30th).
The studio announced today that the 24-year-old sister of Kate Mara (and granddaughter of NY Giants founder Tim Mara) will work alongside Daniel Craig, Stellan Skarsgaard and Robin Wright in the English-language adaptation of the series that follows Salander and Craig’s Mikael Blomkvist on a quest to unravel a decades-long murder mystery. The race for the role has been one of the most competitive in recent memory for young actresses.
Mara just finished working on Fincher’s The Social Network and was also rumored to have screen-tested for a role in Sony’s Spider-Man reboot (one would assume that she was reading for Mary Jane Watson), but it looks like she’ll be heading to Sweden to film the first entry into what the studio plans to be a trilogy. Check out the official press release from Sony Pictures Entertainment below:
(Culver City, August 16, 2010) — Daniel Craig and Rooney Mara have been cast in the lead roles of Columbia Pictures’ three-picture adaptation of Stieg Larsson’s literary blockbuster The Millennium Trilogy under the direction of David Fincher. The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo – the first film of the series, which also includes The Girl Who Played With Fire and The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest – begins shooting next month in Sweden. The screenplay is written by Steve Zaillian and the film is being produced by Scott Rudin, Cean Chaffin, Ole Sondberg and Søren Stærmose. Mikael Wallen and Anni Fernandez are executive producers. The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is set for worldwide release December 21, 2011.
The Millennium Trilogy by Stieg Larsson has been published in 44 countries and has sold more than 40 million copies worldwide thus far. In the U.S. alone, the series has sold over 10 million copies, and the sales were recently calculated at the remarkable rate of one book per second. The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo has broken sales records in virtually every country in which it has been published. It has sold over 5 million copies in the U.S. and has out-sold any other e-book in that rapidly expanding market. A literary phenomenon, all three books currently sit atop the New York Times Best Seller lists. In describing the scale of Larsson’s achievement, The Economist said: “Stieg Larsson’s vivid characters, the depth of the detail across the three books, the powerfully imaginative plot, and the sheer verve of the writing make the trilogy a masterpiece of its genre.” Michiko Kakutani, of The New York Times, described the Lisbeth character: “Lisbeth Salander, Stieg Larsson’s fierce pixie of a heroine, is one of the most original characters in a thriller to come along in a while – a gamin, Audrey Hepburn look-alike but with tattoos and piercings, the take-no-prisoners attitude of Lara Croft and the cool, unsentimental intellect of Mr. Spock. She is the vulnerable victim turned vigilante; a willfully antisocial girl . . . who has proved herself to be as incandescently proficient as any video game warrior.” The three novels have all become #1 worldwide bestsellers, an achievement unrivaled in trade book publishing.
Source: Sony Pictures Entertainment
