Saoirse Ronan
speaker
109 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Nov 2024
Saoirse Ronan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
on a film and just in life it's so intense and we actually shot the lambing sequence before we started principal photography so it was probably about five months prior to us starting the production because lambing season in the Orkney Islands starts in like
sort of April time it's a little bit later than the mainland and then I was thrown straight onto the Orkney mainland and had my hand up a ewe and was pulling a lamb out and I did that seven times and I was sort of coached by different farmers that I met and And they were incredible.
But the really interesting and really humbling thing about it was that sheep don't sort of stick to a schedule necessarily. And so we had to bend our shooting schedule to nature. I would get ready at like 4 a.m. We'd go into the shed and we would just wait and the camera would be ready to go. And sometimes you would go in and there wouldn't be a you that would go into labor that day.
Other times they would. And as soon as they did, Kyle, our farming consultant, was just like, OK, go get her. Go tackle that you to the ground. And he would coach me through it from off camera. And it was just the most amazing experience. So that really sort of set the tone for the rest of the movie, I think.
Now, the other movie that you have coming out this fall is Blitz by the director Steve McQueen. It's about a mother during Germany's bombing attacks on London in World War II. She's worried about her son's safety, so she follows the government's recommendation, which is to send all children to the countryside to avoid the bombing campaigns.
Now, I read that a photo that Steve McQueen saw while researching another project ended up inspiring this film. Is that your understanding of how it came about?
Yeah, he was doing research and came across this incredible photograph of this little black boy on a train station platform on his own. And he had a little cap on and his little suitcase and... And I think I'm assuming a tag around his neck. And Steve was, of course, very intrigued by him and wanted to know what his story was. And so that's where the inspiration for Blitz came from.
And what drew you to the film? I'll say that it's a different kind of World War II film that focuses on those left in London during the bombing attacks.
Yeah, I mean that's really the reason why I wanted to get involved. I of course wanted to make a film with Steve McQueen and I'm such a huge fan of his and I've wanted to work with him for years. I, of course, knew that it was going to be a sort of fresh take on a World War II British epic, but I didn't know exactly how.
And so when he started to explain to me that it would follow a mixed race little boy who he'd found already at that stage, I think Elliot had already been cast in And that it would really focus on the people left behind, essentially, the ones who had to keep society going, which was the women, children and older folk. It just piqued my interest straight away.
And knowing that my sort of role that I would play would be in honouring the mother-child relationship and was just something that I couldn't really pass up. I'm incredibly close to my own mother and we've spent a lot of time together where it was just me and her.
So that dynamic is something that I've always wanted to bring to life on screen and getting to do it with this sort of backdrop was just incredibly exciting.
You were born in New York City in the Bronx. Your parents had moved to the US from Ireland in the 1980s. Why did they come to New York?
It was a rite of passage, really. They left school when they were 15, 16. They needed to get to work. There was more work in the UK and America than there was at home. And I think a couple of their friends had gone over ahead of them, had gotten a bit of work and had something lined up for dad. So he went over and then Mam followed a couple of months later.
And yeah, and they just, they lived there, they experienced life outside of Ireland. And, you know, it was really hard. They didn't have... have anything they didn't have money they you know she had me and of course couldn't afford health insurance and so it was actually I think it was like it was a Catholic church charity or something that helped her a lot when she had me.
The point being that she sort of really had to rely on other sources in order to live. But it was tough, you know, my dad started out in construction He eventually became a bartender and was discovered by a bunch of actors from the Irish Rep in the pub that he worked in. He auditioned for a play. He got the part. He became an actor, a theatre actor.
Mam was a cleaner and then eventually nannied for different families and took me to work with her. And I think at a certain point, My mom in particular realized that this just wasn't the life that she wanted me to have. And, you know, if you're if you want to live comfortably in New York and I would say London as well, you need money. And they just didn't have that.
So they went home where they had, you know, a proper support system. And was your dad's acting career that brought you back to Ireland? Is that right? Yeah. Yeah, it was. So it was a combination of them just needing more support, I suppose, from their family and them wanting me to, you know, have a garden and fresh air to grow up with and in. But also it
it was a time where the Irish film industry was sort of starting to boom a little bit because of filmmakers like Jim Sheridan and Neil Jordan and just a lot of American filmmakers who were becoming really fascinated with Ireland, either because of their heritage or Irish playwrights that they'd grown up reading. And yeah, and so work took him home. So we went back.
Now, you're very good at doing accents. You know, you're Scottish in The Outrun, English in Blitz. You do a specific regional accent in Brooklyn. And, of course, you do an American accent in the films Lady Bird and Little Women. I was wondering if you think about... That living in the U.S. as a baby helped you with your American accent.
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