What is Saoirse Ronan’s star persona now that she’s all grown up? We know she’s a remarkable talent; we know that she’s Irish; and we know that she was a prodigy, earning her first Oscar nomination for acting in Atonement after being cast at age 11. But now she’s old enough to be married, and approximately 70 billion Irish actors have entered Hollywood since she scored her last Oscar nomination, for 2019’s Little Women. This year, she has two potential vehicles — Steve McQueen’s Blitz, in which she plays a mother during WWII, and The Outrun, in which she plays a recovering alcoholic — and she needs a new bit. No longer can she build an Oscar campaign on teaching talk-show hosts to pronounce her name. Now, for at least the first stage of the campaign, she’s found an opportunity: teaching men what it’s like to be a woman.
Recent interviews promoting Blitz and The Outrun have latched onto a moment on The Graham Norton Show that recently went viral, giving her the opportunity to show men how little they think about women’s safety. “I think people have needed something like this on a platform like that to go, ‘Oh, okay. We can talk about it now,” she told the Today show on November 7.
The original incident aired on Graham Norton on October 25 when Norton, Eddie Redmayne, Denzel Washington, and Ronan’s fellow Irish actor Paul Mescal stumbled over one another to laugh about a self-defense technique Redmayne learned for The Days of the Jackal, in which the victim shoves “the butt of your phone” into an attacker’s neck. “Who is actually going to think about that?” Mescal guffawed. “If someone attacks me, I’m not gonna go, ‘Phone!’” “That’s what girls have to think about all the time,” Ronan said in response. “Am I right, ladies?” (This is not the first time Ronan has expressed a similar sentiment; check out Saturday Night Live’s “Welcome to Hell” sketch.) “The older I’ve gotten, the more I’ve kind of felt that it’s just really important that we are communicating that to guys who just don’t have to think about that, through no fault of their own,” she told Entertainment Weekly on October 31.
This is, of course, important subject matter but also smart, campaign-wise, for Ronan and her team to highlight. With two movies to support at the moment, she needs to be able to focus attention not just on any singular topic, but on her personality. She’s not just any talented Irish actor — she’s using her talent for good.