‘I have played a lot of weird people’
At only 24, the Irish actor has already had three Oscar nominations. RACHEL COOKE talks to her about her new film in which she plays Mary Queen of Scots, and she reflects on her country’s changing social landscape and her habit of playing oddballs
IN A hotel room somewhere in London, Saoirse Ronan lies on a sofa, her back rigid against one of its arms, her legs straight out in front of her. She looks a bit like a doll: one that has joints at its hips, but not at its knees. “Sorry,” she says, seemingly unable to get up as I offer her my hand. “It’s these clothes! They’re not mine, and I can’t walk in them.” In an interview she gave not so long ago, Ronan insisted that away from the film sets and the red carpets, she looks a bit like a mother of one who’s “gone mad” in Anthropologie. Her mufti comprises “a lot of knit and some pink slacks that are very comfy”. Not today, though. Today, she is straight out of the last days of disco: her high-waisted, flared jeans are tighter than tight; her vertiginous velvet platforms are encrusted with coloured crystals. To get from where she is to the bottles of mineral water that are arranged on a table less than half a yard away, she could really do with wheels, or some kind of winch.
Not that she isn’t used to this stuff: the restrictions of costume. In her latest film, Mary Queen of Scots, her skirts could hardly be bigger, nor her wigs more elaborate. Did she have to be lowered into her dresses? As I watched, distracted by her latest ruff or some gorgeous little bodice of finest navy corduroy, this was something I occasionally wondered about. “Well, you’re not far wrong,” she says. “Sometimes we did, yes. It would take 45 minutes to get dressed, and then hair and makeup for an hour-and-a-half. Alex [Alexandra Byrne, the film’s costume designer] didn’t want us to crease our skirts, so she had these little swivel stools for us: we would pick up our hoops, swing our legs over it, and then drop the skirt right over it. That way, we got to sit down. But of course you use the feeling the clothes give you. Sometimes, you fight the restriction. Other times, you move with it, in a new way. Wayne McGregor [the choreographer] worked with us on movement, and for me that was the most essential part of our prep: how we’d move in a public setting, and in a private one.”
Ronan waited and waited to make Mary Queen of Scots. Its producers, Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner of Working Title, first approached her about the role five or six years ago: “And I was so delighted and relieved, because I’d been warned that as a female actor, I was probably not going to get anything for three or four years at least.” What? She’s only 24 now. I thought it was only older actresses — by which I mean, I suppose, those over about 35 — who find the parts suddenly drying up. “No, seriously,” she says, eyes widening. “There are more films being made now about girls and women, but even six years ago, people didn’t know what to do with an older teenage girl who was about to go into her 20s. No scripts were being written about that experience, which I find mad, because so much has happened to me in the past few years. I don’t know why you wouldn’t want to write about that. But yes, I’d been told by older actors: you’re grand now, but when you get to 18 there won’t be anything — and
there wasn’t. There was nothing. I was lucky The Grand Budapest Hotel [Wes Anderson’s 2014 comedy] came along, but mostly it was just the girlfriend, the neighbour, the sister: characters that are not fleshed out. So when they asked if I wanted to play a Scottish queen . . . it was brilliant.”
The Rourke/Willimon version of Mary’s life begins in 1561, when the 16-year-old queen, following the death of her husband King Francis II, arrives in Scotland from France to reclaim its throne. It takes in her struggle to rule as a Catholic in a Protestant-led country; her quashing
of (and, later, her failure to quash) various rebellions among her noblemen; and, above all, her determination that her cousin, Elizabeth I (played with aplomb and a great deal of face powder by the Australian actor Margot Robbie), name her as her heir. Much is made of her disastrous marriage to Lord Darnley, whom Willimon depicts not only as a drunk, but as the lover of his wife’s minstrel, David Rizzio — and of Mary’s tolerance of Rizzio’s sexuality (the Scottish queen is depicted as a kind of proto-feminist whose liberal instincts are almost as devoutly felt as her Catholic faith). It also includes a scene, once Mary has been forced to abdicate and has fled south to England, in which the two queens finally meet — something that never happened in real life (Mary died in 1587 without ever having met her cousin).
Ronan began acting when she was eight or nine, in a medical drama on Irish television called The Clinic. She has, then, been working as an actor for two-thirds of her young life, and it would be easy to assume that this might be one reason why she seems to have such a sense of connection with Mary Stuart, whose every move was also lived in public. But she doesn’t see it this way at all.
“The experiences I was having were different from most other young people of my age,” she says, “but I wasn’t in a big Disney show where I was, like, a superstar — and I wasn’t in Harry Potter, either. I wasn’t famous. I was just a kid who was in stuff, and was very lucky to be that.”
Though she was nominated for an Oscar for her role as Briony Tallis in Joe Wright’s adaptation of Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement, at the age of only 13, she insists that she wasn’t known at all until 2015, when she starred as Eilis Lacey in Brooklyn (another role for which she was nominated for an Oscar). “I’ll always have that mentality of ‘no-one knows who I am’ — and I like that.” Until quite recently, she still worried when she wasn’t working. Would everyone forget her? “I’ve definitely felt that in the past. But then I watched an interview with Kate Bush after she went away. No-one forgets about Kate Bush. She does her thing, and then she disappears. Adele does it, too, and Daniel DayLewis. It’s clever, I think, and healthy.”
Does she feel under pressure about her own looks? “I really don’t. I suppose I was playing girls from an early age that had nothing pretty about them — they were weird or they were tomboys — and in order to do a good job I just had to go: well, fuck how I look. I never got cast for my looks anyway.”
We talk for a while about how Ireland has changed (“Oh, yes!” she all but shouts when I bring it up). Before the referendum that led to the repeal of the ban on abortion, Ronan appeared in a video supporting the reproductive rights campaign.
The new Ireland thrills her. “To know it was seen as this backward place, when it never felt like that to us. It was so disappointing. But now we match up internationally to how we see ourselves, and that feels amazing.”