Not exactly your average teenager
It never really made it big, but things have changed since then. A lot. Nowadays adding Ronan’s name to a cast list seems to almost guarantee its success — from Atonement to The Lovely Bones, and now with Hanna and three more movies in the can, she’s certainly on a roll.
There’s no doubt the Carlow girl was born for the acting life — a true optimist, she probably wouldn’t have stuck the pace if she wasn’t. She sees beyond the demands of movie sets and is able to take something positive out of almost any situation.
Playing Hanna in the recent movie, directed by Atonement director Joe Wright, and starring Eric Bana and Cate Blanchett, meant many days enduring sub-zero temperatures in Finland.
“It was very cold,” she recalls. “We stayed for probably about a week and a half, two weeks, and it was very cold, it was probably minus 28 degrees or minus 30 at one stage, something like that ... and it’s so beautiful, I mean it really is a beautiful, beautiful country and it sort of feels like a winter wonderland, it was very amazing. It did make up for the temperature in my opinion.”
She even dared incur the wrath of every Santa-obsessed kid and admits to sampling the local speciality: reindeer.
“It’s salty, but I guess they have to put salt on it, it was lovely, and I had cranberry sauce with it as well, very nice,” she smiles, that coquettish cutesy smile.
Ronan seems to revel in really demanding roles. In The Way Back, the Peter Weir movie shot last year, she plays an orphan girl discovered by a group escaping from a Siberian gulag.
“I had never played a role that was so physical before,” she says, and admits to savouring the tougher jobs. “I always liked the idea of doing something like that, it wasn’t necessarily part of a plan that I had or something that I saw in future work, but it was something that I found really appealing,” she says of Hanna, too. “I imagined that training for something like that would help you to really get into a character and it’s almost like research, and just the whole story is very original, and very cleverly written. There’s so much detail, not only behind Hanna, but with all the other characters as well and I feel like you can take each character and make a movie about each one of them. And then Joe came on board and added another dimension almost by introducing this fairytale aspect.”
So what kind of training goes into such a physical challenge?
“I trained in the gym for a couple of hours a day, and I just worked out pretty hard, like weightlifting and ab crunching and just building up my whole body strength really and I did martial arts in the gym and I did stick fighting. I did weapons training, like bow and arrows, knives, guns, things like that. But there’s one scene where I am doing chin-ups, I’m on a harness (she giggles) but it’s so far away you can’t see, so I’m like this, uhhh, but actually, someone is just lifting me up, so it’s great! So I can’t do any of those, and push-ups, I don’t know how many I can do, I can do quite a few, though.”
Working on Hanna also meant training with firearms, not exactly your average hobby for a 17-year-old Irish girl. “At first I was scared,” she says, “and a bit nervous, because it’s a gun you know, it’s a lot of responsibility, and at the end of the day, you can hurt someone, even if you are firing blanks. So I was nervous about shooting it for the first time and also I knew how loud it was going to be, but then it was fine and you do have this real sense of power, which probably isn’t a good thing, when you shoot a gun!”
Yet the storyline contains a worthwhile message for young women, she believes — perhaps was one of the reasons she was attracted to the role.
“Yeah, I think it’s empowering for women. I mean the strongest characters are the ones that really go on a journey in this film and they are females, and Joe is very good at making those types of movies. He did the same kind of thing with Pride and Prejudice as well.”
Yet the character of Hanna, who boxes, is a very aggressive role model for girls, some might think. “I found that watching women fight in films is quite empowering as a female to watch. I don’t know whether everyone necessarily has to learn how to fight or defend themselves, I mean the ideal situation would be that we didn’t have to defend ourselves, that we could just live our lives safely. I don’t think it’s something that’s essential, but it’s a very personal thing I think.”
Ronan forged very strong links with director Joe Wright since working with him on Atonement and now says she’d be reluctant to make a sequel to Hanna without him. “Joe made this his own film really, he brought something special to it and I think another director, if we found one as innovative and with such a strong idea as Joe, could do it, but just on a personal level, I don’t know whether I’d go back without him.
“It was lovely for us to get back together again and do this,” she says, an obvious fan of the Londoner. “We had spoken a little bit, but when we decided to make the film and meet up in London, that was the first real time in about three or four years that we had actually seen each other again. And it was lovely and it was like we hadn’t really been apart, you know? He’s someone who I had got on so well with, and we really had a great relationship when we worked together on Atonement, and that’s just kind of developed when we did Hanna together.”
As well as being very head-strong and dedicated to her craft, Saoirse also exudes a humanity and a kindness, probably best explained when I quiz her on her favourite fairytale from her youth: ” Oh, I like Beauty and the Beast, because it’s about a woman who falls in love with someone not based on their looks, and I think that’s nice. And the Little Mermaid too.”
For a young woman with such a sense of natural romance, one wonders why she hasn’t done the ‘big teen movie’ yet?
“It hasn’t really been a deliberate choice,” she claims, “it’s just the projects that I’ve picked, and the ones that have interested me and that I felt really passionate about doing, just happened to be dramas and things like that. But it’s never really to do with the genre, and that certainly shouldn’t be the main reason you want to do something, why I would want to do something anyway.”
She adds: “If a teen comedy came along that was really, really well written, and had great interesting characters, and the story was good, and it wasn’t just like this generic drivel that we see so much of, and it wasn’t pretty ... cos I don’t like those pretty, clean, poppy-type things, because teenage-hood isn’t like that at all. I mean, I’m 17 now and I would like people my own age to be able to go see a film that I’m in and really relate to it. And what was great was that was what happened with The Lovely Bones, and I didn’t think it would, and kids my age loved it, so that was fantastic.”
Speaking of ‘normal teens’, can Saoirse even equate with her peers in Carlow, given her jet-setting lifestyle and Hollywood VBFs? “I try and make the most of my time when I’m at home, and I think it’s important to spend time with people my own age as well, cause you can’t be with older people all the time, there’s just certain things that you are interested in, or things you want to talk about that only kids your own age would know,” she says.
“Kids identify with each other, not all of them, but like Hanna, we are all going through this age of experiencing things and I’m not talking about anything tricky, I’m just saying, we are growing up, but yeah, I spend as much time as I can at home when I’m not working. I went to primary school for the full term, like eight years, and I’ve been home schooled since.”
When I press her on her pop culture tastes, like music for example, she mentions The Chemical Brothers. “I think they are fantastic, so brilliant and Joe used to actually play Push the Button from one of their albums. He used to play that on set all the time, and I love what they did with this film, they have their signature sound, which is those kind of heavy beats, and just random sounds from all over the place, but they introduce a real circus fairground type of feel into their music, and I think that’s really cool.
To press home the ‘I’m just a normal teen’ theory I ask her about another love of hers: fashion, and probe her on her outfit today.
“I’m wearing mui-mui,” she says, referring to the Prada spin-off.
Well maybe not exactly your normal teen.
* Saoirse Ronan appears as a teenage assassin in Daisy and Violet alongside Alexis Bledel and James Gandolfini, which will be released later this year
CONNECT WITH US TODAY
Be the first to know the latest news and updates
