EDIT: Three more interviews added!

Thanks again to Caro for the heads up.

Saoirse Ronan is a natural-born killer.

At least, that’s what she projects as the titular character in Hanna, an action thriller in theaters Friday that challenges a child assassin to physically fight her way to the truth about her past.

But slipping out of bubblegum-pink jelly shoes to curl up in her seat on the Four Seasons patio, Ronan is all teen, no terror. Over eggs and salmon, she tells of dragging director Joe Wright to a Lady Gaga concert, grins over a new pair of Easter-egg-blue Ray Bans and quizzes her interviewer on the age American teens can drive.

“That’s so young,” muses the nearly 17-year-old, who lives in Ireland’s countryside. “Are there lots of accidents?”

As Hanna, Ronan masters far more than passing a road test. “Two hours a day in the gym and two hours a day in martial arts” prepped her for icy winter shoots in Finland and Germany opposite Eric Bana, who plays her ex-CIA agent father prepping her for an ultimate, deadly showdown with intelligence agent Marissa Wiegler (Cate Blanchett).

The film also reunites Ronan with Wright, who last directed her at age 13 to Oscar, Golden Globe and BAFTA nominations for her role as young Briony in Atonement, the child whose damning accusation drives star-crossed lovers James McAvoy and Keira Knightley apart.

In an early meeting setting up a then-directorless Hanna with the studio, it was Ronan who threw Wright’s name in the pot.

“I get Joe Wright his work now,” Ronan jokes in her upbeat Irish lilt. “Maybe a week later Joe rang me when I was back in Ireland and told me to get my trainers on and to get in the gym.”

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“It’s all her fault,” confirms Wright, who describes her as preternaturally talented. “I was intrigued to see what had become of her and work with her again.”

Subzero temperatures made fight scenes in Finland grueling. “I’d never shot in conditions like that before,” says Bana, adding that he and Ronan eyed the crew’s Gore-tex jackets with a measure of jealousy while clad in their characters’ fur pelts. “You really have to hop to a little tent that had a heater to stop getting hypothermia,” he says. “For her to pull it off in the way that she did it was really incredible.”

Today in sunny L.A., Ronan gives a mischievous grin, admitting that while she had no problem charging Bana at full speed across a frozen lake, she skipped the mandated muscle-building whey protein powder. “It is disgusting,” she grimaces, glancing at her slender arms, no longer rippled with Hanna’s muscled sinew. “I wasn’t into having muscles,” she says. “I like to look like a girl.”

Bubbly and witty in person, Ronan gave a searing performance that brings to mind the kind of Jodi Foster-like chops and focus her peers would kill for. And after attending the Oscars so young, Ronan says she’d like to go back again, “not necessarily to be nominated but just to go there and really appreciate it,” she says.

Home-schooled (“It’s just easier,” she says) in County Carlow, Ireland, the only child of Monica and actor Peter Ronan (The Devil’s Own) is determined to go to college. “It’s wonderful being on a film set, but essentially you’re pretending to be someone else for like half the time,” says Ronan, who wants to study art history.

“So to go to a place for like, two years when you’re at a really impressionable age and figure out who you actually are, I think that’s just something that I definitely want to do.”

Ronan, who last made a splash in Peter Jackson’s chilling adaptation of The Lovely Bones, acknowledges she’s done “a lot of drama,” but “it’s just kind of the way it’s worked out.” Repeat business with famed directors seems to be her wheelhouse, and while “nothing’s definite” that she’ll play an elf in Jackson’s upcoming epic, The Hobbit, she loves his New Zealand setup, where she shot Bones. “It’s so separate from Hollywood,” says Ronan. “He’s got an entire crew that works with him on everything that he does, and it really, really feels like a family.”

Next, Ronan tries on lighter fare with black comedy Violet & Daisy opposite Alexis Bledel, due this year, and she has an eye out for a clever teen comedy, “like, say, Juno or, back in the day, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.”

“The films that I’ve read have geeks in them and misfits and weirdos and messed-up teenagers,” says Ronan, ladylike in her Miu Miu frock. With a turn of the wrist, she reveals a design inked with TopShop tattoo pens. “It’s great because that’s the way teenagers are.”

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EDIT: Part 2 added.

Thanks to jp+ for pointing out.

Thanks to Caro for the link.

Saoirse (pronounced “sear-sha”) Ronan began her acting career at the age of 9. In 2007, she received worldwide acclaim for her portrayal of the 13-year-old Briony Tallis in Focus Features’ Atonement, which was her first film with Hanna director Joe Wright. The performance earned her Academy Award, BAFTA Award, Golden Globe Award, and Critics’ Choice Award nominations, among others. She was honored with Irish Film and Television (IFTA) Awards for both Best Supporting Actress and Rising Star.

She subsequently won the IFTA Award for Best Actress, honoring her performance as Susie Salmon in Peter Jackson’s The Lovely Bones. The portrayal also earned Ms. Ronan a Critics’ Choice Award; an award from the Santa Barbara International Film Festival; and a BAFTA Award nomination for Best Actress, among other honors.

Among her previous screen credits are Gil Kenan’s City of Ember, with Bill Murray, Tim Robbins, Toby Jones, and Harry Treadaway; Amy Heckerling’s I Could Never Be Your Woman, opposite Michelle Pfeiffer and Paul Rudd; Bill Clark’s The Christmas Miracle of Jonathan Toomey; and Gillian Armstrong’s Death Defying Acts, in which she starred alongside Catherine Zeta-Jones and Guy Pearce.

Ms. Ronan was most recently seen in Peter Weir’s The Way Back, starring alongside Ed Harris, Jim Sturgess, and Colin Farrell. She has wrapped production on Violet & Daisy, from Academy Award-winning writer/director Geoffrey Fletcher, with Alexis Bledel and James Gandolfini.

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Thanks to Caro for pointing out.

Here are Hanna press junkets by Talking Pictures TV and Screen Slam.