Saoirse Ronan turned 15 last April and runs on a different clock from the rest of us. She says she’s glad she didn’t start acting young, because it might have screwed her up and burnt her out. It’s not as if she began acting at, say, three or something. She waited until she was eight, which was more sensible, because when you reach “our age” (she includes me in this) you at least know what you’re doing, and in any case, things didn’t start getting weird until a few years ago, with the Oscar nomination. “So I’m glad I’m only really starting now,” she says firmly. “Because it means I can be seen as an actor as opposed to a child actor.” With that, she wriggles forward on the couch and begins eating her spaghetti bolognese lunch.
Ronan has a roiling Irish accent, gangly adolescent limbs and long, shampoo-ad hair that falls across her face. From time to time, mid-mouthful, she will refer to friends – Susan, Keira, Vanessa – and it takes a moment to realise that she means Sarandon, Knightley and Redgrave, all of whom she has worked with and grown close to. She was knee-high to a grasshopper when she landed a role in an Irish soap (The Clinic), and this led to her breakthrough performance as meddling Briony Tallis in Atonement, which in turn carried her to within touching distance of an Academy Award. Away from the cameras, she likes to sit around, watch the telly, maybe eat a bag of crisps. There is a river at the bottom of her garden where she swims in summer, and a family dog, Sassie, with which she plays all the time. Sometimes she hangs out with her mates; sometimes she plays basketball. “You know,” she says, “normal things.”
In her latest film, as luck would have it, she plays a girl similarly torn between the real world and a gaudy paradise. The Lovely Bones is based on the 2002 bestseller by Alice Sebold and spotlights 14-year-old Susie Salmon, a kid in 1970s Pennsylvania who is killed by the local pervert, then looks down on her family from limbo. “Susie’s in the In-Between,” explains her soulful little brother, and what an In-Between it is. The film is directed by Peter Jackson, of Lord Of The Rings fame, who goes to town on the blue-screen effects and frames Susie’s afterlife as a schoolgirl fantasy, flushed and florid; a land of blooming rose petals and sunflower fields; cascading waterfalls and giant turntables that you ride like a carousel. For good measure, Jackson also crops up for a Hitchcockian cameo as a hirsute customer in the local camera store. “I think Pete wants to be an actor,” Ronan says. “He wants to be famous!” But she’s only teasing.
Ronan was so good in Atonement, arguably the best thing in it, because she gave us the sort of child rarely seen in films. Her Briony Tallis was neither a bad seed nor a clamouring cutey-pie. Instead, she was pensive, watchful and complicated; wise beyond her years, though crucially not quite wise enough to read the nuances of adult sexuality. Some viewers found her unsympathetic, which annoyed the actor, who insists she is an innocent who waded out of her depth. “People say Briony’s a bitch, and she’s not. She’s not vindictive or spiteful. It’s just that she doesn’t express her emotions; she just sits and observes everything, whereas Susie is much more out there. She’s more your typical teenager, running about in the world, disgusted when she sees her parents kissing.” On balance, Ronan is probably more like Susie than Briony. “It wouldn’t be healthy if I were like Briony.”
Ronan’s background proves quite the mish-mash. I’ve read that she was born in New York to an actor father who carried her, as a babe in arms, to the set of The Devil’s Own, where she met Brad Pitt. The bald biography makes her sound like a dyed-in-the-wool showbiz brat. But in conversation there is something rough-edged about her; an unschooled, irrepressible quality that doesn’t go with the script. Besides, she was born in the Bronx, not the Upper East Side, and moved to County Carlow when she was three. Inevitably, her memories of those early years are sketchy. “Unimportant things. I remember my dad’s friend showing me a little spider in a box that shook its legs, and me getting scared. That, and going to Toys R Us. My mam used to drive me to this huge Toys R Us store outside town. Not to buy anything, but just as an outing, to look at things.” She has no memory of meeting Brad Pitt.
Ronan explains that her parents, Paul and Monica, had moved to New York because things were bad at home in Ireland. He worked in construction and then as a barman, she as a nanny. I tell her this all sounds like some 19th-century novel about immigrants coming to America. “I know!” she says, and maps out the opening lines. “He was a barman and she was a nanny! And times were tough!”
Anyway, she continues, what happened was that her dad was tending bar when he met an old Irish actor called Chris O’Neill (“He’s not here any more”) who convinced him to audition for some stage roles, and one thing led to another until the bar’s owner said, “You’ve got to decide. Do you want to be a barman or do you want the acting shit?” Paul Ronan replied, “The acting shit.”
“I don’t come from a family that has money,” she says. “Maybe that’s why this stuff doesn’t bother me. They had to struggle for a long time, and then this happened and things are better.” She gestures vaguely at the hotel room, but I think she is referring to the broader picture; the “acting shit”. The TV gigs, movie roles and Oscar nomination that brought her to Hollywood, even though she knew she wasn’t going to win. She was just too young; it wasn’t her time.
From the outside, Ronan’s life looks to me almost as unreal as Susie Salmon’s afterlife. But, she insists, it doesn’t feel that way to her. Of course it has its oddball aspects. She is not keen on press conferences and premieres, especially the first one in Venice, for Atonement, when everyone was screaming for Knightley and she feared they might get lynched. Neither is she especially comfortable being recognised in the street, which happens a lot in Ireland. “I find that hard to deal with, though I don’t have it as bad as the Twilight people or the Harry Potter kids. But it is weird, especially after doing a film like this one. If I notice that a guy is looking at me – a man – I think, ‘Is this a really weird guy staring at me, or does he just recognise me from a film?’ ”
Until recently she attended Kilkenny College, a Protestant boarding school in the south-east of Ireland. Now she is home-schooled. “The reason was teachers giving me a hard time. Teachers and students.” She pulls a face. “Some of the students were, you know, mean. But I only stayed a while. It wasn’t really working out. You know, the school is a good school and the people who go there are good people. But when your schoolmates recognise you before they’ve met you, and the teachers do, too, it can make things very awkward and difficult.” She shrugs it off. “It’s a shame.”
I suspect she’ll be OK, if only because she is too likable not to find a world that suits her. In any case, she is not prepared to give up on formal education yet. Her mum left school at 15 (“Trouble with the nuns”) and her dad didn’t last much longer. Their daughter, by contrast, has plans to study film at NYU. “College is different from school. Isn’t it?” I assure her that it is, or at least it was for me. “That’s right. People are there because they want to be, and you can choose what you want to study. So it’s very different.”
In the meantime, there are busy months ahead. Ronan recently completed work on The Way Back, a war drama by Peter Weir, and is due to shoot a new movie in the spring that she would love to tell me about but can’t, even though she is clearly itching to, because it isn’t finalised. On top of that, there’s the long round of promotion for The Lovely Bones, which will take her to Tokyo and then America; a necessary part of the Oscar campaign. Ideally, of course, she’d like a bit more time at home, to watch TV, read her book (The Diary Of Anne Frank) or hang with friends. Plus, Sassie is getting to be an old dog – he’s pushing 12 – and time is precious.
Our own time, it transpires, is almost up. I confess I have a silly question to end on and she groans because she thinks she knows what it is. “Do you have a boyfriend?” she flutes in a coy falsetto. “Do you have a boyfriend? Ah God, don’t ask me that. It’s so annoying when people ask me that.”
No, that wasn’t it. Never ask a 15-year-old whether they have a boyfriend or girlfriend; it’s mortifying for all concerned. Instead, my dumb question is about the pronunciation of her name, Saoirse, and all the garbled variations she must have heard. Oh right, she says, a little deflated. Well, she has been called Cerise and Sor-cha, and Seraki, too. “You actually say it ’Sairsha’,” she adds helpfully. “But you can also say it Sersha, or Seersha – both are OK.” She rolls her eyes heavenward. “But, yeah, it happens all the time. They even spelled it wrong on the Golden Globes poster for Atonement. On the Golden Globes poster they got it wrong! Sarise Ronan, they called me.” Next time, I think, they’ll get it right.
Byzantium
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The Way Back
