Rooney Mara finds dressing up for the red carpet pointless and annoying. She says she isn’t a model and so shouldn’t have to dress up all of the time. She complains that she recently had to attend 8 premieres of ‘The Girls With The Dragon Tattoo’ which meant various outfit changes that she finds very tedious. She also rejects the title style icon and says she isn’t interested in anything to do with that:
“For Dragon Tattoo, I had eight different premieres, this many different photo calls. It’s a lot to plan for. It’s not like you can just show up. The thing is, it’s kind of an annoying part of the job—because I’m not a model, and I don’t want to be. I didn’t try to be a style icon. I’m just not that interested in that world. But it does matter, and either I can fight that or I just have to accept that it is a part of my job, and I may as well wear things that I like and that represent me.”
Rooney says that the red carpet makes her very nervous and that it is a “nightmare” to have to walk it surrounded by cameras, especially because the photographers can put her on edge as they scream questions at her. She also doesn’t enjoy the party aspect of a red carpet event because it’s equally as nerve-wracking:
“A nightmare! It’s a panic attack waiting to happen. I don’t even like people to sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to me. When we wrap a film and everyone claps and cheers, I turn red. And then I have to walk out onto the middle of this carpet and there are all these photographers, and they’re all screaming at you. And usually there’s a party at the other end of it, so it’s not even like I have solace at the end of the carpet! It’s like then I have to walk into my other nightmare!”
She hates to fake smile:
“Why should I ‘fake smile’? It feels disingenuous to me. I want to smile when something happy happens, so if I do smile, you know it’s real.”
