“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