Kate Mara turned 43 on February 27. For her birthday, she rented out a small movie theater in her town, invited five friends, and planned to watch Wuthering Heights. It did not go as planned.
Mara told the story on Late Night with Seth Meyers on March 17. She got an email from the theater the day of her birthday.
A new employee had fielded a call from Martha Stewart’s assistant asking if Stewart could rent the theater that evening to watch Wuthering Heights.
The new employee didn’t know the theater was already booked. So they told the assistant no, Kate Mara had it. Then they told Mara she might get a call from Martha.
“I thought, well that’s nice, she might wish me a happy birthday,” Mara said. That was not why Martha was calling.
Stewart emailed Mara’s mother instead, because the two of them are friendly.
The email read, “Please ignore this if this is totally inappropriate, but I hear your daughter has rented out the theater and me and my banker, Jane, are just dying to see Wuthering Heights. Can we crash her birthday party? We’ll sit in the back row.”
Mara said yes. Stewart came. So did Jane the banker.
Seth Meyers asked if there was any photographic evidence. Mara said she had told a friend to get a picture but to be subtle about it.
“And unfortunately they were so subtle about it that they took a picture of just us and not Martha and Jane,” she said. “I was like, what are you doing?”
So there is no proof Martha Stewart attended the birthday party. There is only Kate Mara’s word, and the story is too specific to be made up.
What Is Kate Mara Currently Promoting?
Mara is currently doing press for Imperfect Women, the Apple TV thriller that dropped its first two episodes on March 18.
The show is based on Araminta Hall’s novel of the same name, adapted and showrun by Annie Weisman, who also created Physical and Based on a True Story.
The cast is Kerry Washington, Elisabeth Moss, and Mara. Washington plays Eleanor, Moss plays Mary, and Mara plays Nancy, the one who ends up dead in the first scene.
Eleanor is called in by police to identify the body. The rest of the series follows the investigation backward through the friendship, pulling apart the secrets all three women had been keeping from each other for years.
Joel Kinnaman, Corey Stoll, Leslie Odom Jr., Sheryl Lee Ralph, and Ana Ortiz are also in the cast.
The first two episodes are on Apple TV now, with new episodes dropping weekly through April 29. Eight episodes total.
Variety called it “utterly compelling” and an “outstanding mystery thriller.” Rotten Tomatoes has it at 47%, which is low, but the Variety review reads like a strong recommend regardless of the number.
Mara told The Hollywood Reporter that playing a dead body was not new to her. She played Zoe Barnes on House of Cards, the reporter Kevin Spacey’s character shoves in front of a Metro train.
She played Mary Jo Kopechne in Chappaquiddick, the woman who died when Ted Kennedy drove his car off a bridge.
When she showed up on set for Imperfect Women and found herself on a slab again on day one, her response was, “This was not my first time on one of those slabs.”
Mara’s Film With Werner Herzog
Separate from Imperfect Women, Mara just finished shooting a Werner Herzog film in Ireland called Bucking Fastard.
It is the first movie she and her sister Rooney Mara have ever made together.
They play Jean and Joan Holbrooke, identical twin sisters so codependent they speak in unison, share the same dreams, and fall in love with the same man.
The film follows them on an obsessive quest to dig a tunnel through a mountain range in search of a mythical place called the Orkneys, which they believe holds true love and escape from reality.
Orlando Bloom plays their former lover. Domhnall Gleeson plays a social worker assigned to help them. Herzog wrote and directed it.
Mara described the set as “tiny, tiny, tiny” and said there were bats. She told People Magazine the experience was unlike anything she had done before.
“The script is unlike anything we’ve ever read before. We’re basically playing the same person. And it’s a dream director, Werner Herzog, for both of us. So it was an obvious yes for us both.”
Kate and Rooney have been close since they started overlapping professionally. Kate told ABC News that when Rooney first got into acting, the two of them shared an apartment.
They would both go out on auditions and come home and talk through what happened. “So it just became something super special that you can actually bond with a sibling over,” she said, “which is very rare.”
Rooney is 40. She has two Oscar nominations, for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Carol.
Kate has been working consistently since the early 2000s, with credits including House of Cards, American Horror Story, The Martian, Brokeback Mountain, and Chappaquiddick.
They have had successful careers that ran in parallel for twenty years without them ever sharing a screen.
Bucking Fastard has no release date yet.
Who Is Kate Mara?
Mara comes from one of the more unusual family backgrounds in Hollywood. She is the great-granddaughter of Tim Mara, who founded the New York Giants, and Art Rooney, who founded the Pittsburgh Steelers.
That is two NFL founding families on one family tree, which is not something that happens often.
She has been working since she was a teenager. The role most people know her from is Zoe Barnes on House of Cards, the character who got pushed in front of a train in Season 2.
She is married to Jamie Bell, who she met on the set of Fantastic Four in 2015. They have a daughter.
After wrapping Imperfect Women, Mara moved her family to New York. She told The Hollywood Reporter she has been asking around about Broadway.
She mentioned that her neighbor is Carrie Coon and that their husbands just worked together on a film. She said she has called Coon to ask how to make theater work. “Tell me exactly how we make this work,” she said.
Her cousin John Mara Jr. produced the Broadway show John Proctor Is the Villain. She knows the right people.
For now, Imperfect Women is on Apple TV. Martha Stewart is, apparently, also a fan of Wuthering Heights. And somewhere there is a photo that proves none of this happened.
