Wow! Rooney Mara is nearly unrecognizable on the February cover of W magazine, posing in character as goth hacker Lisbeth Salander in David Fincher’s adapatation of Stieg Larsson’s Swedish best-selling series “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”. Fincher and Mara spoke to W’s Lynn Herschberger from the set.

Despite the highly publicized casting process, Fincher wanted Mara from the beginning. He did see other girls, big names like Natalie Portman, who was coming off three movies and was too exhausted, Scarlett Johansson, deemed too sexy, and a then unknown Jennifer Lawrence, who was too tall. “It was hard,” Fincher recalled. “We had five or six girls audition with the rape scene. The girls had to kick a dildo up his ass. That’s Salander’s big scene, and we had to see if they could do it.” Mara, among the final five or six with fellow unknows Sophie Lowe, Katie Jarvis and Emilly Browning, was put through the ringer. “David added the rape scene at the last minute, and I said, ‘Ohmigod! They must be really serious.’ They did one test, then another a week later. They shot me in the subway in L.A. in full hair and makeup with a motorcycle. Every day they had a new request. On a Monday morning, David called me in, and I said, ‘What do you want me to do to my hair now?’ I was at the end of my rope. He told me I had the part. I hadn’t even read the script yet.” Five days later, she was in Sweden and in motorcycle training. An even more in-depth look at Fincher and the film can be read in the full article.

Co-starring Daniel Craig as journalist Mikael Blomkvist, Robin Wright, Stellan Skarsgard and Christopher Plummer, the film will shoot well into the spring to be ready for a December 21, 2011 release.

See a bigger version of the W cover and one more from the shoot below.