'Girl' talk: Rooney Mara discusses her piercing performance

ROONEY MARA says that she didn't feel any pressure taking on the pivotal role of Lisbeth Salander in David Fincher's version of "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo," which makes her one pretty cool customer.

Salander, one of the iconic fictional characters of the past decade, was very recently played in movies to near-perfection by Noomi Rapace in the Swedish version of the film, and Mara, best know so far for a few minutes in Fincher's "The Social Network," has one of the year's biggest movies riding on her very slim shoulders.

No pressure at all?

"I guess there was," Mara said, laughing, Saturday at Manhattan's Crosby Street Hotel, "but I didn't really think of it like that. Certainly on paper I can understand why it would be a crazy thing to want to sign up for, but once I read the books, I really felt strongly that I had to play this girl and knew I could bring something to her. With David directing, I felt really taken care of.

"I had to go into it without hesitation," she added. "I had to forget all of that pressure and just focus on the task at hand, which was to try to bring this character to life."

That meant getting numerous piercings, bleaching her eyebrows, doing all kinds of crazy things with her hair, adding some muscle to her small frame, getting very naked for three very different sex scenes (one a brutal rape), learning to ride a motorcycle and finding a voice.

That was a hard thing to figure out, she said, "because if you go to Stockholm, you'll see that no two people have the same accent. There isn't a Swedish accent in English. Some people sound British. Some people sound American. Some people have a really thick accent, sort of like a Southern accent. It's so varied. The people from the north sound different than the people from the south, so we really had to pick and choose what we wanted Lisbeth's voice to sound like. That took a lot of work. I worked with someone five days a week on that.

"We all have to sound like we're in the same movie," she added, "but at the same time it's very faithful to Sweden that all of us sort of have our own sound. [Daniel Craig's] character uses a British accent, but being an extremely well-educated reporter, that probably is what he would sound like. There were quite a few people we met who sounded like that. My character, being less educated, would probably have a thicker accent than most of the people in the movie."