Rooney Mara works once a year
Rooney Mara doesn't feel like she's raising her son in a "two-actor house".
The 'Women Talking' actress has two-year-old River with fiance Joaquin Phoenix and though they live in a "creative household", she is lucky enough to be able to work infrequently and can spend as much time as possible with her boy.
She said: "I love [motherhood]. I love it so much. I think it's the best thing in the world.
"I mean, it sounds so cliché when you talk about it, but things are cliché for a reason.
"I have a very privileged life...
"Motherhood is very challenging, even when you have a privileged life."
"I'm so lucky that I have the choice to get to be with him most of the time. That I'm like, 'Oh, I'm just going to work once a year if something feels right and other than that, this is what I'm doing'. Most people don't have that option.
"It doesn't feel like a two-actor house because I didn't work for the first three and a half years we were together.
"Basically since we've been together, I only worked one or two times and one was really small and short. It feels like a creative household, we're constantly talking about creative things."
The 37-year-old actress admitted working on her latest movie 'Women Talking' was an "important experience" for her because it was her first job after having her son and she was unsure how she could make things work.
Speaking to Joaquin's sister Rain Phoenix on her 'LaunchLeft' podcast, she said: "This was sort of my first job that I had done as a mother, and so it was a really important experience for me because I wasn't really sure if I could work, if I can do both.
"I still don't know, but Sarah [Polley] made it possible on this, that we were working 10-hour days."
Rooney found the experience "very idyllic" because everyone was so supportive and helpful.
She said: "I was able to get advice from Claire [Foy] and Sheila [McCarthy] and Judith [Ivey] and all these moms that I was working with, and River was there on set all the time, in the green room. It was a very idyllic situation, it probably won't happen like that again."
