SHOWING HER HAND
Now starring in David Fincher’s new series House of Cards, Kate Mara proves her prowess—on Netflix, of all places.
The New York Giants have just suffered a humiliating loss to the Falcons (0-34), but Kate Mara is at least pretending to be reasonably upbeat. “At a certain point, I just stopped watching,” she says with professional detachment, sipping a glass of Côtes du Rhône at a wine bar near her home in Los Angeles. Deeply schooled in the nuances of the sport, Mara talks technicalities with the fluidity of someone whose great-grandfather, Art Rooney, Sr., founded the Pittsburgh Steelers. Another great-grandfather, Tim Mara, did the same thing for the Giants; her father still works for the team. So as a kid growing up in Bedford, New York, football was inescapable. “My whole life, every Sunday, we would go to church and then the Giants game,” she recalls. “But it wasn’t like we’d show up in face paint and jerseys—we weren’t even allowed to wear jeans in the owner’s box. My grandma was very much, ‘You dress up!’, because it’s a business.”
Now 29, Mara still occasionally performs the National Anthem before Giants home games, and she hasn’t lost an ounce of her polish. Even on a Sunday night, she wears a trim pastel sweater with a jeweled collar, her electric red hair smoothed back and barely embellished skin luminescent, even in candlelight. Articulate and focused, her proclivity to perform began at nine years old, when, dissatisfied with the school-play scene, she started leaving notes on her parents’ bedroom pillows, begging for help finding an agent.
“I had heard that you needed one to do movies and Broadway,” she laughs. “When I was in high school, all I wanted to do was act, so I thought, ‘How can I get out of here as fast as possible and do that full time?’” She graduated a year early and moved to New York City, an hour south of her hometown. “I kind of told my parents it was because I wanted to start college early,” she admits. “I don’t know if they believed me, but they agreed to it. And then I deferred from NYU for however long you could defer, and I was just…acting.”
Her first feature film was Sydney Pollock’s 1999 romance, Random Hearts, and she has steadily increased her exposure with memorable roles like Heath Ledger’s gutsy daughter in Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain and as one of the alluring canyoneers who haunts James Franco’s near-death experience in 127 Hours.
But her new project, House of Cards, is a defining moment for Mara, who stars alongside Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright Penn. The slick political drama was developed for Netflix by David Fincher, Beau Willimon, and Spacey—and judging from the first two episodes, it’s going to be a serious subscription-driver. (In the opening scene, Spacey rhapsodizes to the audience as he breaks a dog’s neck.) Mara stars as Zoe Barnes, an ambitious but novice newspaper reporter who forges an alliance with a powerful D.C. lifer, State Representative Francis Underwood (Spacey). He provides the scoops, and Zoe’s front-page stories propel his personal agenda.
“It’s kind of as twisted as it can be, and yet it’s done in a very realistic manner,” says Mara. “Talking about politics has no interest to me at all, although obviously, I need to know certain things to be a responsible human being. But I’ve always been fascinated by political shows and movies.”
After years of preparation, Mara’s performance as Zoe Barnes proves that she’s calibrated her talents to the level of her co-star. “I didn’t actually meet Kevin until the table read,” she admits. “I trusted him instantly. I think he can probably fake chemistry with anybody, but the most surprising thing about him is how much we laughed together. We have a lot of intimate scenes, and we were constantly getting yelled at, like, ‘You guys, don’t. Focus. Stop laughing. We’ve gotta get through this.’”
Good thing director David Fincher wasn’t an unknown quantity. He had worked with plenty of Mara’s friends, including the English actor Jason Flemyng, not to mention her younger sister, Rooney Mara, thanks to The Social Network and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. “Working with David was very challenging, which is exactly what I want as an actor,” she says of filming, which happened over the course of seven months last year in Baltimore. “One night, at the beginning, we were shooting until three in the morning, and for whatever reason, I couldn’t get this line right. I wish I had counted how many times we did it. I thought, ‘Don’t cry on set. Don’t cry on set.’ I called my sister the next morning, and she said, ‘I’ve been through the exact same experience. You have to trust that he trusts you—there’s a reason he hired you.’”
The sisters have grown even closer since Rooney, two years younger than Kate, took up acting. “She lived with me for the first year and a half that she was in L.A.,” Mara recalls. “We would audition, meet back at the apartment, and talk about it—or not, if it was something we didn’t really give a shit about. We’d just watch Oprah instead. To be able to share heartbreak and disappointment and excitement about your job with your sister, who you couldn’t be closer with, is kind of amazing. Obviously, it’s also complicated, but the benefits are so much greater.”
These days, Kate Mara has nailed a star-making role of her own, and the Giants’ bungled season is in the rearview mirror. At least she’s already the proud owner of a Super Bowl…pendant. “The rings are made for the boys,” she laughs. “They’re ridiculously big, and I have child-sized fingers, so yes, we had to put it on a necklace. But where can you wear that?”