I’m not a huge Rooney Mara fan in any sense. Her fashion sense annoys me, and I find her to be a talented – although overrated – actress. Did you also know that I generally dislike her interviews too? So imagine my eyeroll when I saw that Rooney is Vogue’s October cover girl. Anna Wintour has been a Rooney fan for years, and this is like Rooney’s THIRD Vogue cover. The editorial is kind of nice, although at least one photo made me laugh because Rooney blending into the walls, Buster Bluth-style. Anyway, I went into this interview thinking “please let her tell us that she’s so aloof again,” but it’s fine. The Vogue interview is fine. She comes across as rather affected and hipster, but… I don’t know, it didn’t annoy me too much. She’s the kind of person who asks for her to-go drink (an Arnold Palmer) to be poured into a Mason jar that she brings herself. You can read the full Vogue piece here. Some highlights:

Her new outlook on life: “I have more trust now in the universe and things happening when they’re supposed to. What I try to live by now is: It doesn’t matter what other people think. I try to live for myself. I have to get good at myself, which is a challenge. I’m the meanest critic there is.”

Typecasting issues: “The producers were like, ‘You’re just too Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. You’re not wide-eyed and innocent enough.’ It was right after I had shot Carol, but it hadn’t come out yet. I’m literally wide-eyed in that. I’m sure at some point it will be the reverse: ‘You’re not edgy enough.’ It only makes me bolder. It only makes me want to be like, F–k you! Watch me be wide-eyed and innocent!”

Her sister Kate was always the performer: “She has a better personality than I do. People like her more. Kate knew definitively that she wanted to be on Broadway and do music and acting by age ten. Maybe because I was a contrarian, I wanted to go to school and not be a child actor.” Her essential taste in films has never changed—“dark, cerebral, deeply romantic, goth, weird”—but at eighteen and nineteen she tried out for everything. “Auditioning is like going on a job interview. You have to wear a certain outfit and behave a certain way and play the game a little bit, and I’m just not good at that. I’m really not,” she says. She hates small talk. “I either want no conversation or ‘Let’s talk about your failing marriage,’ ” she says.

She would love to work from bed: “I like to spend a lot of time in bed. If I could take all my meetings and calls there, I would love that.”

How she came to play Mary Magdalene: “I’m like, ‘I can’t do a scene with Jesus. I just can’t!’ ” Yet she was heartened to learn that Joaquin Phoenix would be playing Christ; they are reported to be dating. (Although Mara is coy on details—“I cannot confirm or deny!”—she reports that all is going well. Or, in fact, better: “My love life is great,” she corrects.)

[From Vogue]

While I definitely think Rooney should take a seat if she thinks her actress life is difficult as a goth white woman, I also think… yeah, it is strange that this weird woman has managed to carve out a career for herself on her own terms. Hollywood is a problematic place with major issues in the ways they view women, but also: it’s sort of cool that someone so quirky and weird has been able to work consistently. Usually, someone as weird as Rooney would have been forced to homogenize herself in many ways. Also: I think the whole “I am my own harshest critic” thing is her way of addressing the Tiger Lily controversy, which… let’s face it, she never had to own or take a hit.

Photos courtesy of Annie Leibovitz for Vogue Magazine.