We got a blurry look at Rooney Mara’s Vogue cover this weekend, and we told you it was coming last month. Now Vogue.com‘s posted the real actual cover, as well as Mara’s accompanying editorial and profile. Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott shot the editorial and Jonathan Van Meter traveled to Sweden to profile the upcoming star of the hotly anticipated Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, in a piece that’s as much about breakout star Rooney Mara as it is about her relationship with her director, David Fincher.

It’s a good juicy profile, with lots of telling observations.

Rooney Mara (and David Fincher) on dropping weight to play Lisbeth Salander:

When a waiter appears to take our order, we are all looking at our menus, but I see out of the corner of my eye Fincher nudging Mara. He says with quiet seriousness, “You can eat.” I look up to see her reaction. Mara rolls her eyes, and Fincher laughs. “You can have lettuce and a grape. A raisin if you must.” She orders a piece of fish and barely touches it. In the book, Salander is described as boyish and awkward, “a pale, anorexic young woman who has hair as short as a fuse. . . .” Noomi Rapace, the magnetic star of the Swedish versions, looked more like Joan Jett. “One of the things that make our version that much more heartbreaking,” says Mara, “is that even though I am playing a 24-year-old, I look much younger. I look like a child.” I ask if she had to get unhealthily skinny for the role. She says, “Umm . . . not really.”
“It hasn’t been too hard for her,” Fincher quickly adds.

Mara on that controversial movie poster that shows Mara’s exposed breasts, plus a nipple piercing: