The big question concerning Saoirse Ronan – apart from how on earth one pronounces her first name (try rhyming it with “inertia”) – has been when exactly she might cross the threshold into adult roles, and how. The Irish actor has only just turned 19, so it’s hardly surprising she has spent her career playing children, though that rather under-represents the challenging nature of her parts to date.
Unusually for a young actor, she has achieved fame and acclaim without first passing through the brightly lit high-school corridors of the teen-movie genre. She was Oscar-nominated at the age of 13 for her otherworldly performance as Briony Tallis, the spiteful catalyst for catastrophe in Atonement; she was the murdered girl monitoring the hunt for her own killer in supernatural drama The Lovely Bones; she played a ruthless assassin in Hanna; and in The Host, a teenage science-fiction thriller from the pen of Twilight creator Stephenie Meyer, Ronan was called upon to give a double performance: as both a blank-faced victim of extra-terrestrial possession, and the indefatigable soul still trapped inside.
Given that she has technically never portrayed an adult on screen, Ronan is growing up in one colossal leap in her new film, Byzantium, an atmospheric chiller about a mother-daughter vampire team. Playing Eleanor the 200-year-old bloodsucker does dramatically raisethe average age of the roles on Ronan’s CV, although she insists the secret was to approach her as the 16-year-old she appears to be on the outside. “I didn’t really feel like I was playing an adult,” she says in her gentle Irish lilt when we meet in a London hotel. She’s wearing an emerald-green cardigan, and her fingernails are painted vivid electric-blue. Tissues and medication are spread out on the coffee table to help combat her cold. “Eleanor has been a teenager for 200 years,” she points out. “But that’s still what she is – a teenager. She’s a very old soul. “
