Rooney Mara's experience on Nightmare On Elm Street made her want to quit acting

If an actor is lucky enough to have a long career, statistically, there are bound to be some less-than-stellar projects on their IMDb page. For Rooney Mara, the 2010 A Nightmare On Elm Street remake wasn’t just a dud; her experience working on the film nearly stopped her promising career in its tracks, before she ever really got to prove herself as an actor.

“A few years before [The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo], I had done a Nightmare On Elm Street remake, which was not a good experience,” Mara says in a new interview for the LaunchLeft podcast. “I have to be careful with what I say and how I talk about it. It wasn’t the best experience making it and I kind of got to this place, that I still live in, that I don’t want to act unless I’m doing stuff that I feel like I have to do. So after making that film, I kind of decided, ‘OK, I’m just not going to act anymore unless it’s something that I feel that way about.’”

Mara previously alluded to these struggles back in 2011, telling Entertainment Weekly that she would “self-sabotage” auditions for projects that she didn’t care about. “Sometimes you don’t want to get something but you do a really good job and you get it anyway. That was kind of [what happened with] A Nightmare on Elm Street—I didn’t really even want it,” she revealed. “And then I went in [to audition] and I was like, [whispering] ‘Fuck. I definitely got that.’”

“I didn’t want to act anymore,” the Women Talking star told EW of the experience. “I was like, This isn’t what I signed up for. If this is what my opportunities are going to be like, then I’m not that interested in acting. So I was very discouraged and disheartened. And then I got the Social Network script. That kind of reinspired me.”

Now, on the LaunchLeft podcast, she elaborates, “I got an audition for The Social Network, which was a small part but it was an amazing scene, and then I didn’t work again from that until I think Dragon Tattoo. David didn’t want to audition me for it because he didn’t think I was right for it based on what I did in The Social Network and I kind of insisted they put me on tape anyway so I did, and then he had to fight really hard for me to get the part because the studio didn’t want me for it. It was a definite real turning point in my life and my career.”

“David really took me under his wing. He became my mentor in a lot of ways,” Mara adds. “He took such great care to make sure that I knew that I had a voice and that my opinion meant something. He constantly was empowering me, which I think really affected the rest of my choices thereafter.”