Get your first good look at Rooney Mara as Lisbeth Salander

While we’ve seen what Rooney Mara looks like as Lisbeth Salander in THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO via crudely taken paparazzi photos, we’ve never seen anything proper. That’s about to change as Mara sat for a W Magazine photoshoot, which was overseen by director David Fincher. The photos accompany an article on the making of the movie and profiling Fincher himself. (Somewhat surprisingly, the article is rather light on Mara herself.)

While much of it details Fincher’s work on previous films, there are some nuggets on DRAGON TATTOO:

The script, which captures the novel’s bleak tone (its original Swedish title was Men Who Hate Women), was written by Academy Award winner Steven Zaillian, who wrote Schindler’s List, and it departs rather dramatically from the book. Blomkvist is less promiscuous, Salander is more aggressive, and, most notably, the ending—the resolution of the drama—has been completely changed. This may be sacrilege to some, but Zaillian has improved on Larsson—the script’s ending is more interesting.

This is shocking material for a major studio like Sony. In one of the pivotal scenes, taken directly from Larsson, Salander punishes the man who raped her by raping him with a large prosthetic penis, and then tattooing his torso with the words i am a rapist pig.

So yeah. The film is released this December but not exactly something you want to take mom and dad to before Christmas dinner. Click on the photo of Mara/Salander below to head to W Magazine and read the article for yourself.