Public Appearances > Appearances from 2024 > November 17: 2024 Governors Awards
Saoirse Ronan Wants to Embrace the Mess
ELLE – The Irish actress became an unlikely American everygirl. But at 30, she’s painting with a darker palette.
Saoirse Ronan has made a career of being approachable. Whether she’s playing spunky Jo March in Little Women or the sullen, Manic Panic-ed titular role in Lady Bird, her appeal has always been rooted in her everygirlness. And yes, perched next to me in the booth at a Lower East Side restaurant, she is indeed appealingly regular, from her jeans and T-shirt down to the hair tie encircling her wrist.But two unexpected new parts, both of which are generating awards buzz, may soon upend that perception. In Nora Fingscheidt’s The Outrun, which Ronan coproduced, she gives a raw portrayal of a woman struggling to get sober. Her husband, the actor Jack Lowden (who’s also a coproducer), read the memoir the film is based on and suggested it could be an onscreen vehicle for Ronan. The role was personal, she says, because loved ones of hers have shared that struggle. She has come to see addiction as an illness, as opposed to a character flaw. “Especially if you’re young, it’s very hard not to see it in that way,” she says. “Because if you don’t suffer from your brain essentially being altered by a substance, then you don’t understand why they can’t just choose not to live this life. You don’t understand why they don’t want to, or don’t feel like it’s worth choosing you over it. There’s a lot of confusion that’s born out of it, and resentment, which is what I had, and I still have to a certain extent.” Despite her initial hesitation, she says, “the logical part of me knew that by stepping into the psychology of someone going through it, I could take some of the sting out of it for myself. It really was a way for me to heal from my own wounds.”
Magazine Scans > Magazines from 2024 > ELLE (December 2024/January 2025)
Photoshoots > Photoshoots from 2024 > Session 019
Photoshoots > Photoshoots from 2024 > Session 019
Public Appearances > Appearances from 2024 > October 26: Vogue’s Forces of Fashion 2024
VOGUE – Saoirse Ronan is “a person with the aura of a star but none of the pretence,” finds Reni Eddo-Lodge in the Irish actor’s November 2024 British Vogue profile – unfathomably her first. As the erstwhile child star-turned-Oscar nominee, whose talent has been compared to that of Hollywood matriarch Meryl Streep, took to the stage at this magazine’s Forces of Fashion event, Ronan, in a sinuous red dress, indeed had the charisma of a performer, but the warmth of a dear friend.
In conversation with the legendary British costume designer Jacqueline Durran, whom a 12-year-old Ronan met on the set of Atonement and has since worked with on Hanna, Little Women and Blitz, Ronan is just as keen to steer the tête-à-tête towards Durran’s work on Barbie (“it wouldn’t have been a film that interested me at all unless it was directed by Greta [Gerwig]”) than she is her own career. Still, the old acquaintances find a happy medium in delighting over their most recent collaboration on Steve McQueen’s new take on the quintessential Second World War film. “It was about looking at all of the people in London as individuals and thinking of the different stories, because it’s quite easy to forget that it was millions struggling,” notes Durran of the importance of cutting through the rose-tinted nostalgia. The costumes, meanwhile, are as detail-driven as we’ve come to expect from Jacqueline, who says the watchword on set was “authenticity”, particularly when considering the surprisingly overt glamour that was “part of the war effort to keep up appearances.”
Continue reading: Vogue
On Saturday (October 19) night, Saoirse attended the fourth annual Academy Museum Gala held at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles, California.
Public Appearances > Appearances from 2024 > October 19: Fourth Annual Academy Museum Gala
“She’s Fascinating Eating Cornflakes”: The Endlessly Alluring Saoirse Ronan On Blitz, Kids And Marital Bliss
A riveting silver screen presence since her early teens, when Saoirse Ronan commits to a part the world takes note. Her latest? Playing single mother to an evacuee son during the Second World War, in director Steve McQueen’s history-remaking Blitz. Author Reni Eddo-Lodge travels to Scotland where she finds the multi-Oscar-nominated Irish actor newly married, intent on reflection and ready for her next chapter. Photographs by Jack Davison. Styling by Nell Kalonji
Saoirse 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.”
Continue reading: Vogue
Magazine Scans > Magazines from 2024 > British Vogue (November 2024)
Photoshoots > Photoshoots from 2024 > Session 015
Photoshoots > Photoshoots from 2024 > Session 015
On Wednesday (October 9), Saoirse attended the world premiere of Blitz during the opening night gala of the BFI London Film Festival at The Royal Festival Hall in London, England. Earlier that day, Saoirse attended the press conference for the film. Take a look below.
Public Appearances > Appearances from 2024 > October 09: “Blitz” Press Conference – 2024 BFI London Film Festival
Public Appearances > Appearances from 2024 > October 09: “Blitz” Premiere – 2024 BFI London Film Festival
Miscellaneous > Getting Ready (2024)
Public Appearances > Appearances from 2024 > October 09: “Blitz” Premiere – 2024 BFI London Film Festival
Miscellaneous > Getting Ready (2024)
Hi, Saoirse fans! I have updated the gallery with missing 2024 photoshoots and events (starting from February). Apologies for the late update!
Sir Steve McQueen’s “Blitz” follows the epic journey of George (Elliott Heffernan), a 9-year-old boy in World War II London whose mother Rita (Saoirse Ronan) sends him to safety in the English countryside. George, defiant and determined to return home to his mom and his grandfather Gerald (Paul Weller) in East London, embarks on an adventure, only to find himself in immense peril, while a distraught Rita searches for her missing son.
