Saoirse hankers to play historical heavyweights
ACTRESS Saoirse Ronan has revealed she would love to play an Irish female icon like Constance Markievicz on the big screen.
The Co Carlow star, who has received critical acclaim for her role in Mary Queen of Scots, also name-checked civil rights leader Bernadette Devlin McAliskey as another pivotal Irish woman she would like to portray in film.
But the Golden Globe-winning actress, who is currently filming the period drama Little Women, said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal that she is searching for more contemporary roles in the immediate future.
“I’d like to do something modern now, because I’ve been doing periods lately,” she says.
She told the publication she likes the quiet life when she’s out of the limelight.
“I don’t go to a lot of clubs because I’m busy knitting,” she joked. “I just knit and read history books.”
And while she has become a style icon thanks to her edgy red-carpet appearances, she said she has a much more relaxed style when she is away from the cameras. She described her everyday style as like a “cool Scandinavian mother” as in loose, high-waisted pants and flowing shirts.
She told The Wall Street Journal: “They’re not necessarily Scandinavian, but I just mean mothers who have just had a baby. I look a bit like a mother of one who’s gone mad in Anthropologie.”
She said she stumbled into filming with her first role being in a short Irish art-house film in which her father was acting.
She said: “They needed a kid for it, and they just asked me to do it as a favour. I just loved it as soon as I started.”
But she said she was never a typical drama school kid.
“I wasn’t overly shy, but I wasn’t all ‘jazz hands’ either.”
She said she found acting came very naturally in her childhood.
She told The Wall Street Journal: “When I was a kid and I was working surrounded by adults, you just take it on the chin and take it as it comes. Nothing really affects you too deeply, so just go with it. It’s as you get older that it starts to carry some weight to it.”