I’ve learned a lot from brave Mary
SAOIRSE RONAN told me 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 when we met recently at the Corinthia Hotel in Whitehall.
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 her 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.
The heart of the film is the relationship between Mary and her cousin Elizabeth I, portrayed by Margot Robbie.
And what’s clear in this telling is that most of the men at court — both courts — aren’t eager for them to get on.
The two women rule in very different ways. ‘One essentially wants anything that a man has been afforded: lovers, the ability to rule, a family, friends, being able to enjoy her life and art and music and drink and whatever else.
‘And then,’ Saoirse, continued, ‘there’s Elizabeth, who’s the one who ends up having the longest reign because she cuts herself off from anything human that will get in the way.
‘The only way for a woman to achieve, at that time — and maybe even now — was to say: “I can only be professional and deny myself; or I can only be this other thing.”
‘For instance, in the film, as soon as Mary has her child, all her power is gone. I think Elizabeth is terrified of that. Mary wants to try to have it all — and I don’t blame her,’ Saoirse said, rearranging herself on the sofa and showing off a dazzling pair of boots.
She had a good time making Mary Queen Of Scots because she admired the company Rourke and producers at Working Title Films put together.
She became firm friends with the actors who play Mary’s gentlewomen. Because they were all called Mary — Mary Beaton (played by Eileen O’Higgins), Mary Seton (Izuka Hoyle), Mary Fleming (Maria Dragus) and Mary Livingston (Liah O’Prey) — they were nicknamed The Maries.
The Oscar-winning hair designer Jenny Shircore created fabulous hair styles for them. ‘We called ourselves The Spice Girls, because there were five of us,’ Saoirse laughed. Director Rourke arranged pre-filming sessions for them with movement director Wayne McGregor. ‘We were in a studio in Marylebone in these mock corsets, and we were doing these routines for hours, and we had this experience of not caring how we looked. So when filming started months later we knew each other, and it made filming easier because we were friends. ‘I’ve been in films where there might be one other woman, so this was joyful. I’m in the middle of filming Little Women for Greta Gerwig, who made Lady Bird. ‘There’s Florence Pugh, Laura Dern, Eliza Scanlen, Emma Watson and Meryl Streep and it’s quite exciting to share a film with all these women.’
THE actress added: ‘Once upon a time it was a celebration, when women were in movies. The likes of Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Katharine Hepburn, Barbara Stanwyck ruled the screen. They played powerful women in films at a time when the industry was so male dominated.
‘It’s funny how those women were known as real tough nuts but they probably wouldn’t have had the careers they had if they weren’t like that.’
After Little Women, Saoirse’s next project will be Ammonite, a film directed by Francis Lee, with Kate Winslet — who has remained on the A-list for more than two decades.