31-Year-Old Rooney Mara Just Ate Pie for the First Time and Will Never Eat Pie Again

Rooney Mara has been famous for about seven years now, but do we really know who Rooney Mara is? Oh sure, we know that she’s a very particular actress who takes very particular roles in very particular films. Films that often contradict her all-American roots. Often those roles find her playing characters from other continents and other time periods. Her mother’s family founded the Pittsburgh Steelers while her father’s started the New York Giants. She’s a National Football League scion, and how much more American can one get than that?

One could say that she’s American as apple pie, and yet, Mara doesn’t even eat pie. In fact, she had never eaten pie in her life until she was forced to for her role in A Ghost Story.

The revelation comes from an in-depth story about the film in The Los Angeles Times. Though the film is perhaps best known by those who have scene the trailer as “that one where Casey Affleck wears a bed sheet and pretends to be a ghost,” it turns out that one of the most talked-about scenes by those who have actually scene the entire thing involves Rooney’s character devouring an entire pie in a fit of grief.

In fact, this might be the most important pie scene in all of cinema since, well, American Pie. USA Today proclaims “you’ll never look at pie the same.” This is how big a deal this five-minute long, single take pie-eating scene is.

Naturally, the Times had to ask Rooney what is was like to film such an important pie eating scene.

“It was certainly something that popped out at me when I read it, that was one of the things I was really excited to do,” she said. “So it doesn’t surprise me that it’s something that jumps out of the movie. It was such a unique way of showing grief, we’ve never seen anything like that before. And I’d actually never had pie before, that was my first and last pie.”

Times writer Mark Olsen expressed shock at the fact that Mara has never eaten pie before, and includes a quote form director David Lowery expressing the same bewilderment: “I asked that same question.” Wouldn’t we all?

“I just don’t really have a sweet tooth and I was a really, really strange, picky child,” she offered by way of explanation. “Something about pie always grossed me out and I just never tried it before. And this came along and I tried making them switch it to something else, but David really wanted it to be pie, so we did pie.”

So they did pie.

Mara did not like the pie. She did not like the pie at all. “It was some disgusting sugar-free, gluten-free, vegan chocolate pie. It was really gross,” she earlier told Indiewire. Mara maintains a vegan diet in real life, but jeez, if you’re going to have pie for a single time in your life, at least have a little sugar in it.

Though, maybe Mara just didn’t grow up in a pie family. Perhaps the Maras are more cake people, because Rooney isn’t the only Mara that seems bewildered by pie.

Related: Rooney Mara Woos a Hot Priest and a Fighter Pilot in Secret Scripture Trailer

Rooney Mara’s 18th Birthday Was Not Like a Typical Pie-eating Teenager’s: