Saoirse talked with Cath Clarke about the film “Byzantium”, “The Grand Budapest Hotel”, why she declined The Hobbit and how Hollywood doesn’t have to mean meltdown. Read the article below:
A bundle of energy, Ronan is the most teenage teenage actress we’ve ever met. Child stars are not meant to grow up normal – they’re meant to grow up wild like weeds, into tangled messes. Not this child star. She emerged a fully formed actress in Atonement, only 12 when she filmed her scenes as Briony Tallis. Seven years later she’s brutally honest about the dangers of being a teenager in Hollywood. ‘I could have ended up like Lindsay Lohan. You’re being offered all these different temptations.’ Like what? ‘You know! And everyone is either telling you how great you are or talking about you behind your back. Lindsay Lohan was the ‘It’ girl from like 14. That’s a lot of pressure. If you don’t have your mam telling you “Remember, you’re still my daughter”, you’re going to go off the rails.’
We’re in a nice hotel in London. In the room next door, Ronan’s minders are in a flap. Heavy winds delayed her flight in from Dublin by two hours. Interviews need to be rescheduled. She can’t be late for the Jonathan Ross TV show. Next up she’s starring in a Ryan Gosling movie he’s directing. Cheerfully oblivious, Ronan tells us The Grand Budapest Hotel (due out next year) was her first job without her parents’ chaperoning. The hotel was ‘cool and everything’, but she had been hoping to get a place with a little kitchen of her own. ‘I wanted to be able to cook for myself,’ she says wistfully. ‘I don’t want everyone doing everything for me, you know?’ Her face is a picture of teenage earnestness. ‘I want to naturally be able to grow up as a normal person.’
To be fair, nothing much in her life is normal. Ronan was 13 when she was nominated for an Oscar for Atonement, her memories of the night are of being ‘knackered and hungry’, and she was on a film set before she could walk. Her parents emigrated to New York from Ireland in the late ’80s when times got tough. Her dad Paul took every job under the sun, including one in a bar – where a regular, an Irish actor, suggested he go along to an audition. ‘He never looked back.’
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