Kate Mara said she and her sister Rooney Mara found out they had booked their roles in “Bucking Fastard,” a film from Werner Herzog, the way only he would tell them: with a letter.
“We got a letter from him,” Kate Mara told Jada Yuan at TheWrap’s studio at the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival. “It was a joint letter, and I was so excited. It was like, ‘Dear Mara Sisters,’ and then it described his movie. It’s just so rare to get sent something from one of your creative heroes.”
“Bucking Fastard” stars the Mara sisters as “siblings who speak as one, fall in love with the same person, and eventually spiral” (with Orlando Bloom and Domhnall Gleeson along for the ride). This marks Herzog’s first narrative feature since 2019’s “Family Romance, LLC,” and the Mara sisters’ first time sharing the big screen.
The sisters read the script separately, then each met with Herzog one-on-one before signing on.
Rooney Mara said meeting Herzog alone lived up to the hype.
“He just lives up to everything you could imagine, and then some,” Rooney Mara said. “He told me a lot about his love story with him and Lena. We talked about the script. I remember bringing up how I felt about the end of the film. I was like, it feels like it ends pretty abruptly, and he was like, ‘Not abruptly enough.’”
“He’s just so clear on what he wants and what story he’s telling that it really gives you such confidence,” Kate Mara added. “I just think that takes away like 80% of the questions or the concerns that you might have about anything regarding the film.”
Gleeson also joined the cast, at the Mara sisters’ urging. Kate Mara said the two of them lobbied Herzog directly to cast him.
“We pitched you,” Kate Mara said. “I said we’ll never get him, but we should try.”
“He loves to pitch that he has never been over budget and that he always wraps early,” Gleeson added. “He’s not a garbage collector, so he’ll do more.”
Bloom met with Herzog over Zoom, and said the director made the stakes of the job plain from the start.
“It was like, ‘You are my bucking fastard,’” Bloom said.
In his review of the film, The Wrap’s Ben Croll wrote: “To his credit, the director never tries to explain the central duo — we don’t know how or why they ended up this way, and that’s perfectly fine. But we also never really learn anything about the otherwise ‘normal’ foils they interact with.”
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