Saoirse’s stronger thanks to playing ‘messy and wild’ Mary

SAOIRSE RONAN says portraying Mary Queen Of Scots, the sovereign who lost her head, helped her to keep hers intact.

‘Making the film was brilliant for me in a personal as well as a professional sense,’ the actress said while speaking to me at London’s Corinthian Hotel.

While she was shooting the film with director Josie Rourke, one of her earlier pictures, Lady Bird, was awaiting release. ‘I was being prepared to be thrown out into the world in a way I hadn’t been before,’ she said. ‘With that comes fear. The fear of having to make decisions that hadn’t really been laid on me before.

‘The kind of decisions that weren’t going to make that person over there happy, or that powerful person there happy. But one that’s right for me. Honestly, playing Mary gave me that strength.

‘Ultimately, when it came to work, I always knew what I wanted to do — and didn’t want to do.

‘But it’s very easy to say this is the thing I want to do, and hard to say this isn’t what I want to do.’

Saoirse, 24, explained how Mary gets to the stage where she says: ‘I need to do what’s right for my country and what I feel is right.’

What emerges so sublimely in Saoirse’s powerful portrait is a ruler who has been humanised. ‘That line of Stuarts, the French and the Scots, are a lively lot.

‘She’s not poised. She’s a bit messy and wild. You can’t really contain her,’ the actress told me of her character.