Saoirse Ronan was happy to make men squirm but one thing still terrifies her

Back in 2015, Saoirse Ronan was in London doing promotion for Brooklyn, in which she played a young Irish woman who moves to New York in the 1950s. She had just moved to London from Dublin herself, aged 21, and was calling her mother every day. That stuck in my mind. Time has passed, of course; Ronan is 30 now, recently married to her long-term partner Jack Lowden, who has his own devoted following as River Cartwright in Slow Horses. I have to ask her, though, when we meet to talk about playing a mother herself in Steve McQueen’s Blitz, whether she still makes that daily call.

She shuffles a little. “No, she’s off the hook; she’s gotten rid of me now,” she says. “I used to call her six times a day. It was a bit much. She hasn’t spoken to me since!” That really is unimaginable; we both laugh. It is true, however, that it is a different experience talking to Ronan, now a polished, articulate and careful interviewee clearly used to being surrounded by lights, cameras and a dozen people taking note, than it was when a conversation with her felt like talking to a friendly fellow passenger at a Dublin bus stop. She feels in charge.

Ronan has now been in this game, as I notice she mentions quite often, for 21 years. She has certainly made films that flopped, but never garbage; if she has chosen to be in a film, as a journalist on Irish radio said to her recently, you would certainly think about seeing it. And that has been true since she was 13, when she was nominated for an Academy Award for her role as the quietly wilful Bryony Tallis in Atonement. She was, said The New York Times in its 2020 list of the 25 greatest actors of the 21st century, “in full, disciplined command of her gifts right from the start”.

Saoirse Ronan’s comment on The Graham Norton Show went viral.

Her control of the moment came to the fore recently on The Graham Norton Show, where she was sitting on the couch with actors Eddie Redmayne, Denzel Washington and her good friend Paul Mescal, star of Gladiator II. Her perfectly timed comment on women’s fear of attack – not a usual chat-show subject – cut between the lads having a laugh about the idea of using a phone for self-defence.

“That’s what girls have to think about all the time,” she said pleasantly. And added, in the middle of the ensuing silence, “Am I right, ladies?” The studio audience cheered; social media did the rest. Of course, Ronan has been asked about her viral zinger repeatedly while doing press for Blitz. She has always said she doesn’t like the kind of inquisitive attention you get as a public person, but this sits well with her. She has had messages from all over the world. It’s hugely encouraging.

“I think the fact that a moment like that happened on a show like Graham Norton, which is something the entire nation tunes in to watch, means it has gained traction – which I think is amazing,” she told Irish radio. “It’s opening a conversation.”

What is more remarkable to me, however is that there has been none of the usual backlash, as far as I can see. Maybe the forces of misogyny have just been drowned out by the chorus of approval. Or maybe it’s just that nobody, not even an internet troll, could take exception to Saoirse Ronan.

Ronan’s father, Paul, is an actor; she was first roped into a show he was doing when they needed a child in a hurry. She was nine and loved it. That was the start, more or less, of a life of homeschooling between movie jobs, with her central role in Peter Jackson’s The Lovely Bones (2009) an early highlight. As a young adult, among her most notable performances have been the two films she made with Greta Gerwig, Lady Bird (2017) and Little Women (2019), both Oscar-nominated. Gerwig told Vogue magazine that working with Ronan was like “sharing one brain”.

Saoirse Ronan plays a mother searching for her son in Blitz.Credit: AP

Long before Blitz came along, Ronan had told her agent that she would jump at any chance to work with Steve McQueen, the Oscar-winning director of 12 Years a Slave (2013), Hunger (2008) and the critically lauded Small Axe series about West Indian culture in ’50s Britain. As it happened, McQueen had become interested in the experience of the Blitz, when Londoners sat out the Luftwaffe night after night. A photograph of a small Black boy in a too-big overcoat captured his imagination. Who was he? Where was he going? He had an idea for a story about the people still at home in a country at war.

Ronan plays Rita, a working-class Londoner who had a son with Marcus, a West Indian man she met at a dance club. He was deported; she lives with her son George (newcomer Elliott Heffernan) and her elderly father, played by musician Paul Weller, and is one of hundreds of women working in a munitions factory. McQueen depicts a London that is already far more multiracial than popular imagery of the Blitz has ever allowed.

He also shows East Enders under siege, forbidden by government top brass to shelter in the Underground as the bombs rained down until, finally, the mob forced their way in. It’s not exactly the story passed down of everyone keeping calm and carrying on. “I’m not trying to shame us,” McQueen told the Financial Times. “There was heroism everywhere in the Blitz. I never set out to discredit anything. I just wanted to tell the truth – a story about what was, rather than what we would like to have been. Reality is healthier.”

George is one of the many hundreds of children whose parents send them to billets in the country, out of harm’s way. Both he and his mother are distraught. He’s only nine. George is a feisty one, however; when the train slows down, he jumps off. Thus begins his long journey trying to get home, a picaresque series of encounters with gangs of runaways, criminals and false benefactors; the film’s sensibility has often been compared with Spielberg, but seems to me closer to Dickens, with George as a mid-century Oliver Twist or David Copperfield, keeping his hopes up as he trudges sturdily through misfortune. His mother, meanwhile, is a force of nature: a Cockney lioness determined to find her cub.

Saoirse Ronan with Elliott Heffernan in Blitz: “I always wanted to make sure it was as special and fun for him as it had been for me.″⁣Credit: AP

Ronan has said that she has always wanted children and that now, with a partner and house and a career that could withstand a few gaps, is probably the time. Her on-screen rapport with Elliott is remarkable; a scene where she snuggles with him on a bed, telling him how much she loves him, is so sweet and easy that it is a real surprise to hear they shot it on their first day together. It looks maternal, she agrees.

“But my relationship with Elliott in real life is so built on a friendship, we really feel like we’re pals,” she says. What was crucial to her was that here was a child actor, working with adults on a big film set for the first time. She had been there.

Saoirse Ronan with James McAvoy in Atonement.

“I always wanted to make sure it was as special and fun for him as it had been for me,” she says. “So that, weirdly, became my sole focus.” Her mother was on set with her until she was 18, looking out for her while also impressing on her how important it was to be on time, but she had a lot of protectors: Paul Rudd on her first film, James McEvoy on Atonement, Juno Temple – who remains a good friend – and Guy Pearce. “A gorgeous Kiwi actor called Rose McKay. Do you know her?” she asks hopefully. Bill Murray. Susan Sarandon. James Gandolfini. The string of names keeps coming. “I don’t think you forget the people who gave you time.”

Does she ever regret not going to school? Even the mucking around she didn’t do? “Ultimately, no,” she says. “There’s always going to be things you’re going to miss out on. I didn’t have the social life that some of my mates had and of course that’s going to have an effect on you, in the same way it would if you had a bad experience at school, or you did have a very rich social life, or you had a bunch of siblings you grew up with, or you were an only child. There’s going to be pluses and minuses to everyone’s experience.

Saoirse Ronan in The Lovely Bones (2009).Credit: Paramount Pictures

“But, fundamentally, I had such a happy childhood on a film set and I think it’s given me such a great start in life. I was working on, like, serious films, you know. I wasn’t the star and I wasn’t treated as such. I was supported and I was loved, but I was very much a child in an adult’s environment.” She doesn’t say it made her clever, but it looks that way.

Her toughest times came later, when she worked on stage. For some reason, I mention the common actor’s nightmare of suddenly forgetting all the lines and, usually, what play it is. Ronan sparks into spontaneous memory. “I still have that nightmare! I developed night terrors after a play I did a few years ago and it was that exact anxiety dream. That was on Macbeth. And I actually had that experience when I was on stage with The Crucible; I’m nervous just thinking about it, but it was the closest I came to stage fright.

Saoirse Ronan and Jack Lowden at the Emmy Awards in September.Credit: AP

“I remember it was the first act, near the end. I was on stage and in my head I was like ‘I don’t know what’s going on and I don’t know what’s coming next and I don’t know if I just said anything’. I came off the stage and I was white as a ghost, I thought I was going to pass out. Awful. I’m not doing any more plays like that! I’m going to do a comedy.” She has one earmarked, by Belfast playwright David Ireland. “I want to do a new play, a modern play, I want to use my own accent and I want it to be funny. And it’s going to be in a small theatre.”

She enjoys being decisive. She and Lowden were partners in Arcade Pictures, a production company set up to make The Outrun, directed by Nora Fingscheidt and recently released in the UK; Ronan stars as a recovering addict living in the Orkneys. She wants to direct in the next couple of years.

“I am very much ready to take more responsibility as a filmmaker,” she says. “I’ve been gaining so much experience since I started – 21 years ago! You’ve worked with so many different types of filmmakers, so many different actors, you have a sensibility for the management of a set that I think a lot of directors don’t have.”

Would she want to direct a comedy, then? “The first won’t be a comedy, but it will have lovely, funny moments,” she says firmly. “I think humour is essential for every piece of film or TV. I think if you can make someone laugh or smile, they trust you. Then you can really make a connection.”

Blitz has that, she adds. Funny bits. Smiles. “It has so much life to it and music, so it feels very young to me. Not just because we follow a child, but because with Rita and all her friends there’s like this joie de vivre, this light that keeps burning. There’s no hope for anyone in Macbeth. Or in The Crucible. But I don’t find Blitz depressing at all.”

Blitz is on Apple TV+ from November 22, and also screens as part of the British Film Festival, britishfilmfestival.com.au