The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011)

“I was hopeful to come back, but they decided to do a different thing. It was always a character I wanted to revisit; but that’s not what happened.”

“We made that movie for an entire year, which in movie time is unheard of,” Mara remarks of the experience she and Fincher enjoyed shooting the original film. “It was one of the most incredible experiences I’ll ever have in my life, I’m sure. I still feel very close to it. Some of those people are still my dearest friends in the world; making it without them would have been very strange.”

Because of that sense of kinship for the character, as well as the film’s crew, Mara remembers feeling frustrated while waiting for official word on whether the next two Millennium films would be made and with whom. Then, at a certain point, she realized she just had to let the experience go, especially once it became clear that Fincher wouldn’t be behind the camera again. Sony’s decision to move directly to The Girl in the Spider’s Web — the fourth book in the series, and the first not written by Larsson, who died in 2004 — tempered her enthusiasm as well. “Nothing would have matched that [initial] experience,” Mara says now, confessing that she still hasn’t read Spider’s Web. “Different director, different author of the book. I would have loved to have done it, but I think it probably would have been a letdown in a way. It never would have matched the experience I already had.”