Kate and Rooney Mara Finally Share the Screen — Playing the Same Person

NEW YORK — THURSDAY, OCTOBER 8, 2026 — No, you're not hearing double. At the New York Film Festival on Thursday night, Kate Mara and Rooney Mara finally did the thing they've been talking about for years: they acted together. And they did it the hardest possible way — as twins Jeanie and Joanie, two people so fused into one that they speak in unison for nearly the entire two-hour runtime of Werner Herzog's gloriously strange "Bucking Fastard." Move together, dress together, think together, vacuum together. Fall for the same man, obviously, together.

01 Two sisters, one person

Den of Geek's David Crow nailed what Herzog is actually doing here: Jeanie and Joanie aren't really two characters. They're "one person; one characterization; a single performance told via two Maras" — and to suggest there's a meaningful difference between them is, in the film's own logic, almost an insult. The sisters get aggressively annoyed when anyone mistakes them for a mere double act. They're not twins, in the way the film sees it. They're singular.

That's the joke and the ache of the movie at once. Jeanie (Kate) and Joanie (Rooney) can't so much as vacuum the living room or open a can of sardines without each other's help. Their bond extends to romance: both fall helplessly for Gareth, played by a game Orlando Bloom, who responds to some wild, intimate encounters with both sisters by demanding a restraining order. His rejection sends the sisters off on a search for a place where they belong — which is to say, a place that will take them exactly as they are, in stereo.

02 The craft of speaking as one

Here's the part I love: the sisters went into this assuming it would be brutally hard, and then discovered it wasn't. They worked with a vocal coach to learn to speak concurrently, and they played what Rooney called "weird acting games" and held singalongs in their trailers to get in sync. But as Rooney joked at the post-screening Q&A: "I should probably lie and say it was so hard, and that we worked for months and months. But it was surprisingly easier than we thought."

And of course it was. "We had a whole childhood of playing together," Rooney said. "I don't think we realized how much that was going to help us." Think about that for a second — decades of sisterhood as an acting technique. When they first read the script, they tried to find ways to separate the twins, to give them individual lines. The deeper they got, the more they merged them. "When we spoke alone, it was horrible," Rooney said. Kate added that even a single separate word would prompt a secret conspiracy: "Let's just do that one together." There's something genuinely moving about two actresses discovering that the thing that makes them weird is the thing that makes them good.

03 Herzog, being Herzog

Only Werner Herzog, at 84, could take a story loosely based on real twin sisters Freda and Greta Chaplin — actual people who spoke in unison and seemingly shared one personality — and turn it into a dark fairy tale that doubles as a tribute to his late friend David Lynch. Far Out called it Herzog's best narrative feature in over a decade, "a bittersweet sororal dramedy," and noted he specifically asked his actresses not to research the real Chaplin sisters. Of course he did. Herzog doesn't want the facts; he wants the ecstatic truth.

The film relocates the sisters to Ireland — County Kildare doubling for Wessex in the third act, per the festival reviews — and surrounds them with Herzog's gallery of oddballs: Bloom's Gareth, and Domhnall Gleeson as Timothy, a social worker whose main job is helping the twins figure out how to use a can opener without four hands attempting to operate it. The NY Post hated it, calling it a "creepy, self-indulgent mess." Den of Geek wrote that the sisters play like a winking inversion of the Grady twins from "The Shining" — spooky, but funny, and weirdly wholesome. When critics disagree this wildly about a Herzog movie, that's usually the sign it's the real thing.

04 The collaboration decades in the making

Step back from the weirdness for a second, because the human story here is lovely. Start with the résumés: Rooney is a two-time Oscar nominee — "Carol," "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo," "Women Talking." Kate, 43, is a TV mainstay: "House of Cards," "Pose," "Imperfect Women." Two serious, established careers, and somehow, as both sisters said at the Q&A, they'd never found the right project to do together. Not for lack of wanting. "It's so hard to find something that has two equally interesting roles," Kate explained at the Q&A. Rooney's deadpan reply: "We still didn't find that. We basically play the same person!"

That's the whole movie in one exchange, honestly — the frustration and the joke and the love, all at once. They've long wished to work together, and this was the first thing that made sense. Not a prestige drama where one of them is the lead and the other is the wife. A Herzog fever dream where they're the same person, twice. "Yeah," Kate said, laughing along. "So we're still looking!" For more festival-season cinema, check out A24's Anthony Bourdain biopic with Dominic Sessa and the Academy Museum Gala lineup for October 17.

05 Still looking for a home

Like its NYFF stablemate "The Man I Love" — Rami Malek's career-best turn, also still undistributed — "Bucking Fastard" is seeking U.S. distribution with no release date announced. Venice in September, NYFF on October 8, AFI Fest on October 21, and still no buyer. Say what you will about the indie market in 2026, but a Werner Herzog film starring two Mara sisters speaking in unison for two hours is exactly the kind of movie that needs a distributor with a sense of humor and a marketing department with nerve. Somebody's going to have fun selling this one.