Rooney Mara will be ‘The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo’

After months of speculation over one of the most buzzed about casting choices in recent history, Sony has announced that actress Rooney Mara will play Lisbeth Salander in David Fincher’s English-language version of “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.”

Mara, whose most notable credit so far is “The Nightmare on Elm Street,” has already worked with Fincher on this fall’s “The Social Network.”

The 24-year-old had been rumored to be in running for the part, up against other relative newcomers such as French actress Léa Seydoux and Australian actresses Sarah Snook and Sophie Lowe.

Mara will star opposite Daniel Craig in three films adapted from author Stieg Larsson’s “The Millennium Trilogy,” which also include “The Girl Who Played With Fire” and “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest.” Shooting commences in September in Sweden, Sony announced Monday. The first film will be released in December 2011.

As my colleague Steven Zeitchik noted recently, the leading role in the trilogy is a challenging part. “Salander is a raven-haired beauty who’s at once fierce and vulnerable,” he wrote, “someone who betrays some serious emotional damage but who also can be the tough girl when it counts.”

It’s difficult to judge how Mara may fare in the role. Most of the reviews for the “Elm Street” reboot earlier this year were left largely without mention of her. But take what you will from this April assessment by Robert Abele in the Times, which said of Mara and her young male costar, Kyle Gallner: “[they were] cast out of the Kristen Stewart-Robert Pattinson school of pasty, glum adolescence.”