Maia TorresSaoirse Ronan considered wearing a blazer for this interview. The 30-year-old Irish actor assumed that she’d be speaking to a fashion journalist to accompany her first time featuring on the cover of British Vogue. Five minutes into our conversation, I can see the cogs in her brain turning. “You know what I’m just realising… ” she says, clocking that I am an author. You don’t need to worry about dressing to impress me, I say. “I know that now!” she exclaims, chastising herself. “I feel like such an idiot.”
Saoirse Ronan is not an idiot. Before she turned 26, she had won a Golden Globe (for Greta Gerwig’s coming-of-age comedy Lady Bird) and accumulated four Academy Award nominations, the first, when she was 13 years old, for her portrayal of precocious teenager Briony Tallis in the film adaptation of Ian McEwan’s Atonement. When, in 2020, The New York Times included Saoirse in its list of the 25 greatest actors of the 21st century, the newspaper noted that she has been “in full, disciplined command of her gifts right from the start”.
When Ronan appears in the doorway of Toast, a small riverside wine bar and café in Edinburgh, the most attention-grabbing thing about her entrance is Stella, the four-year-old petit basset griffon Vendéen she acquired just before lockdown with her new husband, actor Jack Lowden, whom she lives with between London and Scotland and married a couple of weeks before we meet. She worries that Stella might annoy people and get in the way, but I’ve met much worse behaved dogs. The potential interview blazer has been replaced with a lightweight black liner jacket. I ask if she’s into fashion. She looks reluctant. “I should probably say that I am.”
Satin shirt with pleated cuffs, Awake Mode. Gold and pavé-diamond earring, Louis Vuitton High Jewellery Jack Davison
“I know that that’s nice,” she continues, gesturing towards her handbag. Perched beside her is a grey Louis Vuitton Slim Trunk. It’s a compact clutch, toughened up by chunky silver hardware. Ronan has been an ambassador for the fashion house since January 2024. “When I meet people like Nicolas [Ghesquière], who’s the artistic director of Vuitton, or Elizabeth Saltzman, who has styled me, nothing comes from nowhere with them. There’s roots to their approach and their decision-making and their style.” Talking to Saoirse’s longtime stylist [she has since started working with Danielle Goldberg] a few weeks later, I recount this conversation. “She’s not about fashion,” Saltzman agrees, “fashion is just part of her job, but she has an innate sense of style and it’s hers.”
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Today, Saoirse wears a thin white tee, light blue jeans and sensible Salomons. Her jewellery is dainty and interesting. She mixes silver and gold, wearing small gold hoops, two delicate necklaces and lots of rings, including a silver Claddagh. Then there is Saoirse herself: pale and petite, short blonde hair and piercing blue eyes, a person with the aura of a star but none of the pretence. She is tired of taking part in photoshoots where the theme is “ethereal”, but I can see why that word follows her around.
We are meeting to discuss Blitz, Turner Prize and Oscar-winning director Steve McQueen’s big-budget take on the quintessential Second World War film. Set in 1940s war-torn London, Saoirse plays Rita, a young single mother to nine-year-old George, played by newcomer Elliott Heffernan. Their family unit is rounded out by Rita’s father, Gerald (played by super-musician Paul Weller, in his acting debut). George is brave and bruised by the world. The family faces social stigma because George isn’t white, but he is too young to understand the hostility directed at him, why he is singled out for cruelty. The sustained German bombing campaign means that George can no longer live at the family home in Stepney Green. He is due to be evacuated to the countryside, but he doesn’t want to go and Rita is heartbroken to see him leave. When George boards a train full of evacuees, he escapes, taking his destiny into his own hands. We follow his adventures over the course of an intense few days as he tries to find his way home.
The film’s themes are contemporary as much as they are historical: love, loss, racism, colonialism, the devastation of war. It’s fascinating subject matter post pandemic. “We’re still dealing with the trauma of the Blitz, you know?” says McQueen when I speak to him from his home near Amsterdam. “‘Keep calm and carry on’ or ‘stiff upper lip’ – all that stuff was held inside people and has had a huge effect on generations.”
For Ronan’s part: “I’ve been saying to my agent for years, if someone like Steve McQueen asked me to meet him, or audition for him, please make sure that that happens,” she says. But she was adamant that she wasn’t into “just doing another war movie. We’ve kind of had our fill of that. As soon as [Steve] started to explain to me that it was going to follow this mother-son relationship and that we were staying back home with everyone else… I was completely hooked.”
McQueen has been thinking about making a film about the Blitz since 2010, when he was doing research for Small Axe, his critically acclaimed television series about the lives of London’s West Indian community in the mid-20th century. “There was this photograph of this young Black boy, [wearing an] overcoat that is a little bit too big for him,” McQueen recalls, “holding a briefcase, with a cap on. I thought, ‘Where’s he? What’s his story? Where’s he going?’”
In June 2020, the global Black Lives Matter movement sparked heated debate about the British Empire and Britain’s role in the transatlantic slave trade. In the middle of a march against systemic racism in Bristol, activists toppled the statue of Edward Colston, a man known for being both a generous benefactor of the city as well as a slave trader. The protesters were condemned by politicians, some who thought the act was a desecration of British history. Collectively, we grappled with an uncomfortable reckoning, coming to terms with the fact that many of our most treasured monuments were intertwined with an ugly history of slavery and colonialism. Less than a year later, after the fall of the Colston statue, an investigation from The Guardian found that dozens of streets, buildings and schools named after slave traders and colonists had been renamed.
I ask McQueen if the film is a response to these broader conversations about contested British history. “I’m not reacting to anything other than, ‘I’m doing my research.’ I’m looking at what’s going on, I’m seeing what’s happening, I’m putting it out there,” he says. “I have no interest in responding to any nonsense. I want that printed, because even if you say you have no response to it, it can be, you know, played in that way. That was never my intention, absolutely not. I’m a filmmaker. I’m a storyteller.”
Almost every child educated in Britain learns about the Second World War. Blitz is full of facts that I remembered from history lessons at school: queues for rations, DIY eyeliner stocking seams, crowded air-raid shelters. Our understanding of the “Blitz spirit” is one that the historian Richard Overy describes as a myth of community, stoicism and resilience. It’s an optimistic, patriotic portrait of Britain under attack. Meanwhile, a concurrent conversation about history has gripped the nation in the last decade, with campaigners struggling to get an understanding of racism and British colonialism on the curriculum. McQueen’s film intertwines these narratives, using the fact that Britain’s colonial empire was thriving during the war to depict a multiracial London. Soldiers from colonised countries across the empire were called to fight. George’s father, Marcus (played by CJ Beckford), is from Grenada, a Caribbean country that was under British rule until 1974. A flashback scene sees him dragged away by policemen in handcuffs after he suffers a racist attack at the hands of a group of white men who take offence at witnessing a mixed-race relationship. Rita tries to argue with the police, but Marcus is resigned. This is the journey of a white woman experiencing unjust racist oppression for the first time.
Another scene sees George finding himself face to face with the meaning of his existence in Britain. His journey back to east London has him stumbling across a glittering arcade dedicated to the gains of the British Empire. Images of sugar cubes and figurines of enslaved Black people harvesting sugar cane are displayed behind glass windows in a grotesque celebration. It’s a Nigerian air warden named Ife – a man from a country that was a British colony until 1960 – who finds George wandering alone and gives the little boy the guidance he needs. This is a striking reckoning with Britain’s colonial past. Blitz positions the country as both victim and villain during a time period that is mostly looked back on with hazy but rosy nostalgia.
I ask Ronan if she has considered the political implications of the film. “I haven’t.” Then she backtracks: “Well, that’s a lie. I’m fully expecting this to start a conversation in the way that it should and in the way that, in particular, [Steve’s] work does, and always seems to, because he executes it so powerfully and so brilliantly. But to be honest, to hear from you, someone who has a finger on the political pulse and making that point, like, that’s going to be an essential, uncomfortable conversation, I think, for a lot of people to have.”
The only child of Paul and Monica, Ronan was born in New York, where her parents had emigrated to from Ireland, in 1994. The family moved back to Dublin when Saoirse was three years old, before settling in Ardattin, a small village in County Carlow. Raised “culturally” Catholic, she went to a small school before her acting career began, then was homeschooled for a while “because I was on set so much”. The homeschooling was “weird”, she says. “I didn’t enjoy that.” She continues: “I think that’s the one regret I have, just for the social benefits, that I wasn’t in the same environment as people my age for a few years. [It] felt like I had a bit of catching up to do.” Has she caught up now? “Yeah, just about.”
She started acting at nine years old and has had no other job since. “It was something that I started to do before I knew that that’s what I wanted to do,” she tells me, taking a sip of juice. “The first thing that I ever did was play a kid in this sort of odd arthouse short film that my dad was in. Because my dad is an actor and they needed a kid, and he had a kid, and so I did it, and I sort of went into it begrudgingly because I wasn’t the child who actually liked a lot of attention.”
When Paul Mescal starred opposite Ronan in 2023 film Foe, one of his first reactions was relief: relief that she still loved acting. “The thing you always wonder about with younger actors is if they get success at a young age, whether they will sustain the appetite for the actual work,” he tells me. “And she absolutely adores it. She has an innate instinct for character and story that is like her God-given talent.”
During our conversation, I sense that Ronan has perhaps always possessed the wisdom of a child who spent most of her formative years around adults. Her interest in creativity is paired with a level of trust in her abilities that comes with many of her acting peers being decades older than her. In advance of shooting the images that accompany this story, she requested a call with photographer Jack Davison and stylist Nell Kalonji to understand the concept of her cover shoot – a contemporary take on Lee Miller, who was British Vogue’s accredited war photographer with the US Army from 1942 onwards. “Jack is clearly someone who wants to do more than just take photographs,” enthuses Ronan. “He’s, like, an absolute artist. I think that made a really big difference for me. And the fact that he and Nell really did actually want to tell the story.”
When I ask her if she’s the kind of actor to trust completely in a director’s vision, she says confidently: “I used to, when I didn’t know better. I know more. I have more experience. I’m now at the point where there are a lot of directors that I work with who haven’t been doing it for nearly as long as I have. I’ve never directed a movie before, so I haven’t been in their shoes, but I know instinctively what actors need.”
This criticism doesn’t apply to McQueen, of whom she is nothing less than effusive about. “One of our first conversations, before I’d even read the script, was about our mothers,” says Ronan. “In particular, for me, my relationship with my mum has always been so intense, in a way, and so intimate. He held on to that one conversation that I’d had with him and sort of infused the whole relationship between myself and Elliott with this notion that there’s no other relationship like that. He’s incredibly respectful of actors. He values what we have to bring to a story so much that performance is sort of king for him, which is amazing because not every director is like that.”
Did she feel a sense of responsibility to Elliott, now 11, who was nine when they filmed Blitz? “I wanted him to always feel like he was safe on that film set,” she says, “and this is what I would always say to the producers and to Steve – I know nobody understood the mindset that that kid was in more than me.”
A couple of years have passed since Elliott started filming Blitz. When I meet him on the British Vogue set, his face remains the same, but his limbs are longer. He and his dad tell me that he had only acted in one school play – his teachers noticed his talent, informing him that he should consider acting – before his mum found an open call-out that McQueen’s production company had put on Facebook. “This is Elliott’s film,” Saoirse says. “What he brought naturally to the table was so magic and so interesting to watch, and that’s all he needed to do.”
Ronan knows what it’s like to be directed as a child. “One thing that pretty much every young performer has in common is that they’ll never say no, because there’s the need to please that comes from being a performer and also being a child,” she says. “You want to be good, and you want to be liked, and you want to be loved and accepted. We needed to acknowledge that constantly, daily, and remember that it was up to us to remind Elliott that if he didn’t feel completely comfortable or safe, or didn’t feel like he was getting the rest that he needed, or didn’t feel right about doing certain things, that he had a voice to stop that.”
When she’s in front of photographer Davison’s camera with Elliott, there are moments when he looks up at her with a kind of awe and admiration in his eyes. They are comfortable together, grinning and laughing. She’s warm with him – making silly faces, tickling him, bringing him out of his shell. Solo, Saoirse is elfin and elegant in front of the camera. Her movements are slow, controlled and deliberate when she poses. She’s excellent at posing, with an incredible side profile that first showed up in Atonement. She strikes poses akin to a Greek goddess. Arms gracefully lifted, neck curved, she looks up to the sky. Then Davison puts the camera down and she seems to snap back into being mortal.
I wonder what it’s like to direct her. Greta Gerwig, who did so in Lady Bird and Little Women, emails to tell me working with her is “like sharing one brain. With Little Women, I remember I wrote a line that I heard her say in my head. I had a complete, imagined experience of the performance. Then a year later we were on set and doing the scene, and about four takes in she did the line just as I had dreamt it, without me ever explaining it to her.”
“We still say that whatever we’ve found is so precious,” Saoirse says of Greta. “I don’t know why it is that it works, but it just does. That is like a one-in-a-million experience, to find that with someone who works in your world. We feel so, so lucky that we found that with one another.”
She treasures the important relationships in her life and speaks with love about the support her mum, Monica, poured into her when she was a child actor. “She always insisted that we never stay in a hotel. We’d have dinner every single night that she’d make at home. We wouldn’t talk about work unless I wanted to. She’d run over my lines with me one hundred times. But it wasn’t everything, and she always valued my state of being and my feeling of safety and security above all else, without me feeling like I was the most important person in the room.”
Eight days before we speak, the Irish Independent breaks the story that Ronan and her long-term partner, Jack Lowden, had tied the knot in Edinburgh. She is still getting used to calling Jack her husband. She doesn’t want to talk about their relationship too much, but we do talk about our aspirations for family lives. Ronan is curious about mine, and I tell her that the older women in my family are impatient that I marry and have children. “And do you think you do want those things?” she asks. This is a pertinent topic for her. I bat the question back.
“Yeah, I do,” she says. “I became successful when I was quite young. So it meant that, actually, by the time I found my partner, I’m now at the stage where if it happened, I would like to have a kid. I feel fortunate enough that if I step out of this for a minute, I’m hopefully not giving it up forever. But, yeah, I’ve always wanted that.”
It’s with Lowden that she’s moved into producing. They set up a company, alongside seasoned producer Sarah Brocklehurst, specifically to make The Outrun, which was released in September and based on Amy Liptrot’s 2016 addiction memoir of the same name. In the film, Saoirse plays Rona, a young woman who returns home to the Orkney Islands in search of sobriety. Jack gave her the book to read in lockdown. “We both believe in each other’s ability so much, so he would have known that not only was that the next role that I would want to play, but it’s the next role that I needed to play.”
Ronan once said that it’s easier to play fictional characters than living ones, but in this instance author Amy Liptrot was involved in the screenplay. “I must tell you about this first very freaky, uncanny moment,” Liptrot tells me conspiratorially when we speak. “I was sent these videos of what they called ‘chemistry Zooms’, which was Saoirse alongside auditioning actors. There was just something in the way that she moved and the way that she spoke that felt like me.”
For Saoirse, acting is life and life is acting. We speak about alcoholism, her character Rona’s central struggle. “From a professional point of view and from a personal point of view, it was a topic that is very personal to me,” she explains. “It’s an addiction that’s caused me a lot of hurt and anger, as it has for, like, every second person that you meet. To be able to live through the experience in some way of someone who’d suffered from that addiction, to try and understand her from this other side was a gift.” I point out that “living through” is an interesting way to describe playing a character. “Yeah,” she responds. “I mean, if you’re doing your job right, then you are, for those two minutes that you’re doing a take. There’s no artifice. It is real.”
Her longtime friend, the author Scarlett Curtis, confirms Ronan’s commitment to her work. In a decade of friendship – the pair met when Ronan was 20 and Curtis 19 – Curtis doesn’t “really know that much about her, in her work life, weirdly”, she says. “She’s so focussed on what she does. She puts so much care and discernment into the choices that she makes with films, but it means when she shows up, she shows up and she is there to be that character. But she also very much shuts off from her friends.”
It’s with Lowden that she’s moved into producing. They set up a company, alongside seasoned producer Sarah Brocklehurst, specifically to make The Outrun, which was released in September and based on Amy Liptrot’s 2016 addiction memoir of the same name. In the film, Saoirse plays Rona, a young woman who returns home to the Orkney Islands in search of sobriety. Jack gave her the book to read in lockdown. “We both believe in each other’s ability so much, so he would have known that not only was that the next role that I would want to play, but it’s the next role that I needed to play.”
Ronan once said that it’s easier to play fictional characters than living ones, but in this instance author Amy Liptrot was involved in the screenplay. “I must tell you about this first very freaky, uncanny moment,” Liptrot tells me conspiratorially when we speak. “I was sent these videos of what they called ‘chemistry Zooms’, which was Saoirse alongside auditioning actors. There was just something in the way that she moved and the way that she spoke that felt like me.”
For Saoirse, acting is life and life is acting. We speak about alcoholism, her character Rona’s central struggle. “From a professional point of view and from a personal point of view, it was a topic that is very personal to me,” she explains. “It’s an addiction that’s caused me a lot of hurt and anger, as it has for, like, every second person that you meet. To be able to live through the experience in some way of someone who’d suffered from that addiction, to try and understand her from this other side was a gift.” I point out that “living through” is an interesting way to describe playing a character. “Yeah,” she responds. “I mean, if you’re doing your job right, then you are, for those two minutes that you’re doing a take. There’s no artifice. It is real.”
Her longtime friend, the author Scarlett Curtis, confirms Ronan’s commitment to her work. In a decade of friendship – the pair met when Ronan was 20 and Curtis 19 – Curtis doesn’t “really know that much about her, in her work life, weirdly”, she says. “She’s so focussed on what she does. She puts so much care and discernment into the choices that she makes with films, but it means when she shows up, she shows up and she is there to be that character. But she also very much shuts off from her friends.”
Both Blitz and The Outrun deal with traumatic material. I ask Ronan how she looks after herself after a day of screaming and crying on set. “It’s incredibly cathartic for me to do that,” she says. She has recently started working with a therapist. She likes cooking. She stays away from social media – “it would only cause me stress” – but admits she “set up a fake Instagram for a spell” to follow foodie content creator Natalia Rudin. “She’s great. I was kind of obsessed with her.” She likes being outside, but not around too many people. “We have a gorgeous garden where we live up in Scotland. I was gardening the other day and it was the happiest I’ve been in weeks because I wasn’t thinking about how I felt or what that meant.” She recently cooked a meal with three onions that she’d grown in her garden – “proper big onions that you’d get in the Co-op”. Her dog, Stella, joined her at Leavesden Studios while she was filming Blitz. “There was something in me that was like, I need to put my needs to one side because Stella needs a walk. That was so good for me.”
The thing, Mescal says, that he has learnt about Saoirse the more they’ve become friends is that “she is one of the few people I can look at in this industry who has an amazing work-life balance. The time she’s able to invest in her relationships I find really inspiring.”
Ronan isn’t an actor who gets satisfaction from “being well-known or having a load of Instagram followers”. She puts everything into, and takes everything from, her work. For McQueen, she “really is Bette Davis. There’s extraordinariness in her ordinariness,” he says, with something akin to awe in his voice. “She’s fascinating eating cornflakes.” I didn’t really believe in the concept of a star before meeting Saoirse. I do now.
Blitz will premiere in select cinemas on 1 November 2024 and stream globally on Apple TV+ from 22 November 2024
Cover look: Draped crêpe jersey dress, Fforme, at Net-a-porter.com. Hair: Franziska Presche. Make-up: Niamh Quinn. Nails: Angel My Linh. Set design: Rachel Thomas. Production: Mini Title. Digital artwork: Ochre Post. With thanks to Elliott Heffernan and The Master Shipwright’s House, SE8
Madeline Fass
Benjamin Wallace-Wells
Catherine Zielinski
