You wouldn’t believe what people send each other!
Saoirse’s tells of her fears about sex and social media
SAoiRSe RoNAN says young people should be released from pressure to have sex before they are ready.
‘ There’s no getting away from what we are exposed to in the media, music videos and everything on social media. They’re all shouting at us to go out and have sex Right Now, and most young people aren’t ready. They should be allowed to hold onto their innocence.
‘ When my parents were younger, they’d watch telly in the evening. Now you go on Snapchat and all that’s involved in those platforms. You wouldn’t believe what people send each other!
‘My friends and i discuss this a lot and i do think some kids feel they have to scramble into having sex before they even have a clue what it is they’re going to do,’ Ms Ronan told me.
The 24-year-old actress received the first of her three Academy Award nominations 11 years ago: for director Joe Wright’s film of ian Mcewan’s novel Atonement, in which she played 13-year-old Briony Tallis, who tells a lie about a rape which destroys two people’s lives. Saoirse knows the landscape of a Mcewan tome well. We were discussing carnal knowledge as it relates to her character musician Florence Ponting, a gifted violinist, and her marriage to edward Mayhew (Billy Howle) in Dominic Cooke’s sublime adaptation of another Mcewan work, on Chesil Beach.
ostensibly, it’s about Florence and edward’s disastrous wedding night in 1962, the year before Philip Larkin decreed that ‘sexual intercourse began’.
‘Florence and edward were both virgins on their wedding night,’ Ronan said. ‘They didn’t grow up in a time where they could discuss their feelings.’
She added, with a hint of incredulity, that Florence’s knowledge of sex came from a manual that described the act ‘like it was some sort of science experiment’.
But as much as the film, which opens here on May 18 (the day before that other wedding), is about the failure of the newlyweds to connect, it’s also about how class puts us in our place.
Cooke and his cast capture the conundrum of the social divide.
When i visited the set about 18 months ago, the director was filming scenes in which Florence and edward were having supper in their room, as two waiters served them. The couple have to summon up the nerve to tell the servers to clear out.
‘The formality of the Fifties was still there, just, in 1962,’ Cooke pointed out. There’s a class difference, too, in the honeymooners’ family backgrounds.
Her
parents are uppermiddleclass — her mother a don, her father a captain of industry, who may or may not have been too familiar with his daughter. And as played by emily Watson and Samuel West, they’re spot on.
His folks are cut from different cloth. More liberal and less bothered with table settings, the Mayhews are the antithesis of the Pontings.
Not least because edward’s mother, beautifully played by Anne-Marie Duff, is challenged by head injuries she suffered in an accident at a railway station; while her husband, played by Adrian Scarborough, has his hands full teaching at the local school.
‘ There was this fear of the future, and a toxic nostalgia for the supposedly fabulous Fifties,’ Cooke said.
The movie, produced by elizabeth karlsen and Stephen Woolley in conjunction with BBC Films, seems firmly anchored in that time and place — a lot of which is down to Sean Bobbitt’s cinematography and Suzie Davies’ production design.
But it’s also because Ronan and Howle disappear into their roles — and you ache for them.
‘Watching two people just misunderstanding each other,’ Ronan agreed, sadly. ‘They didn’t have the vocabulary to make it right between them.’
We’ll be seeing Saoirse again in January when director Josie Rourke’s debut film for Working Title, Mary, Queen of Scots, opens (though it will most likely play the autumn film festivals first).
Howle, meanwhile, is preparing to star with Helen McCrory and Richard Gere in the Tom Rob Smith eight-part thriller MotherFatherSon for BBC and HBo.
And Cooke? He’s working on a new film project, and planning the return of his acclaimed production of Follies to the National Theatre, with Janie Dee and Peter Forbes reprising their roles, in February. imelda Staunton has told me she’s ‘all musicaled out’ and has no plans to re-join the company.