Thanks to M for the heads up.

“I’m sorry, my voice might be a little hoarse,” Saoirse Ronan cautions when she gets on the phone from Los Angeles, where she is doing press for “Hanna.”

The night before, the star of the hard-driving, surprisingly emotional action flick attended the Lady Gaga concert at the Staples Center. This morning, her Irish accent has an even more loamy quality.

“It was amazing. It was absolutely fantastic,” says Ronan.

The concert tickets were a birthday gift from her parents. In a little less than a week, the actress with eight films and one Academy Award nomination to her credit will turn all of 17.

Most actors who come to the big screen as children migrate to adult careers with varying degrees of success. Got it: Anne Hathaway. Figuring it out: Zac Efron. Flailing miserably: Lindsay Lohan.

From the start, Ronan eluded the box. Even at 12, she never seemed to be a “child actor,” just a gifted performer guided by intriguing choices.

“We have seen kids who are great when they’re young, but when they get into their teens, they aren’t that impressive anymore,” she says. “Because it’s a hard thing to do, convince people that you’ve developed and grown up. Because maybe they always want to see you as an 8-year- old. I’ve never considered myself a child actor.”

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Born in the Bronx, N.Y., and raised in Ireland, Ronan is the only child of actor Paul Ronan and a one-time nanny, Monica Ronan. She appeared in a couple of Irish television series. But her great promise came to luminous light when she portrayed Briony Tallis in the 2007 adaptation of Ian McEwan’s wartime novel “Atonement.”

She was 13 and became one of the youngest actors to receive an Oscar nomination, for her turn as the young girl who allows a lie to tragically derail the lives of those near to her — sister Cecilia (Keira Knightley) and Cecilia’s love, Robbie (James McAvoy).

Briony might have been played as a bad seed, a cold catalyst of disaster. Instead, Ronan captured a youngster who was powerfully observant but not (contrary to her own assessment) wise beyond her years.

Ronan has an almost preternatural trust in the camera to locate meaning and emotions in her blue eyes, her pale, beautiful — not easily pretty — face. And the roles she’s chosen to play — an envious little sister, a victim of a hideous crime in “The Lovely Bones,” a Russian girl on an impossible trek in “The Way Back” — speak to a career already driven by rich characters.

“Hanna” reunites Ronan with “Atonement” director Joe Wright for a ride as contemporary as the elegant romance was bound to its World War II time period.

A trained animal

“Hanna” is a kinetic, volatile fairy tale about a wicked witch (Cate Blanchett) hunting down an innocent if lethal girl. Eric Bana portrays the father and one-time CIA asset who’s done much to prepare his daughter physically for a showdown but little to aid her unschooled soul.

“She seems, to me, to have a very simple outlook on life. She’s been trained her whole life and been through very strict regimen. And she’s very disciplined. But she’s kind of like an animal who’s been trained, like a dog or something,” says Ronan.

“When she steps out into the world, everything, absolutely everything, is new to her. She’s never experienced any of it before. As an actor that’s so brilliant to play with, to basically have the mind of a young child, so fresh and naive and fascinated by everything.”

Watching Hanna’s curiosity unfold is just as satisfying as watching her take on her red-haired nemesis.

And we’d like to say that Ronan continues to make a name for herself. Only, that first name is, she admits, “the thing the press has gotten wrong most.”

It’s pronounced “SIR-shuh.” Practice. Memorize. We’ll be saying it for years to come.

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What is it about this starry-eyed young actress that makes directors see a monster? Saoirse Ronan, soon to be 17, stars in the new action-thriller Hanna as a single-minded child assassin targeting the CIA, in particular an ice-cold agent played by Cate Blanchett; and in her next film, Violet & Daisy, she plays the comedic version, as a bubble-gum popping, gun-slinging hit-girl. After making her breakthrough in Atonement, earning an Oscar nomination for playing a unforgiving, heartsick young girl who ruins the lives of two adults, she became the go-to actress for sinister characters with a sweetheart veneer. Even in Peter Jackson’s The Lovely Bones, as the victim of a child-murderer, the Irish actress was the centerpiece of the darkest of storytelling, narrating the aftermath of her own demise, including the story of the man who slayed her.

Hanna delves deep into another disturbed psyche — of a little girl who has only learned two things: how to survive and how to kill. Directed by Joe Wright, who also guided her in Atonement, it is a surreal and truly grim fairy tale (accompanied by a techno Chemical Brothers score) about a young woman reared in the wilderness who is finally unleashed on Blanchett’s wicked step-mother-figure. Hanna is simultaneously Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf, joined into one.

“She’s not a very human person,” Ronan concedes. “She’s grown up as, not cold, but she’s quite detached.” Wright had Ronan’s hair bleached blond, including her eyebrows and eyelashes, rendering them almost invisible and lending the character an eerie blank expression. “It was done to have the center of the face be the eyes,” she says. “If you’ve seen Atonement, you can see Joe focuses a lot on my eyes. I guess he wanted to do that on this as well. He wanted to take away everything that took away from the blue of my eyes.”

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Ronan’s eyes may be the movie’s most intense special effect. And let’s face it — they make the rest of us look like our eyes are two raisins sunken in bread dough — a comparison that makes Ronan laugh and say she’s flattered. A sense of humor is not something Hanna the character shares with the actress who plays her

“She experiences everything very honestly,” Ronan says. “She’s grown up in the place where she is surrounded by wildlife and animals and no other person except this man. So she doesn’t have anything to take reference from.” When given the choice to return to civilization and find this mysterious CIA woman, she’s as eager to go as any teenager with a freshly acquired driver’s license (something Ronan is about to get in real life.)

What separates Hanna from other child assassins — like Hitgirl in Kick-Ass, or Natalie Portman in The Professional — is the character’s naïveté. “I find with Hanna, she’s an animal,” Ronan says. “That kind of innocence is really different from what we’ve seen connected to other killers before her. The younger action heroines we’ve seen have always been quite cute and a little bit cocky, and come up with these really cool catchphrases after they shoot someone in the head. And it’s all made quite light.” The actress shrugs. “Maybe that’s why people will like her, because she’s not cool. She doesn’t have cool purple hair. And she doesn’t wear a cape.”

She gets to play that side — the cocky, catch-phrase-y kind of gunslinger — in Violet & Daisy, an independent movie that hasn’t yet set its release date. Directed by Geoffrey Fletcher, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of Precious, Ronan plays Daisy and Gilmore Girls’ Alexis Bledel is Violet, two pretty young things who are also contract killers. “I was worried for [Fletcher] to have an actor who had just done a film where I am a killer. But you’ll see when Violet & Daisy comes out, they couldn’t be more different [from Hanna],” Ronan says. “Daisy is a really, really sweet girl. She’s not a natural killer like Violet is. Violet is a bit messed up, and she’s quite tough on the outside. She’ll face anything. And she seems quite cold, but she’s been through an awful lot.”

This time, Ronan plays the mother figure. “Daisy’s the one who keeps them together and keeps everything intact. But it’s bizarre.” How bizarre? “Well, they meet at a doll hospital,” Ronan says. “They are the best of friends and live together and don’t really mix with the outside world. They have their own little world. And everything is poppy and fun and about puppy dogs and dresses. They’re taking on this job because they want to get this dress that their pop idol has. Her name is Barbie Sunday.”

Ronan is more circumspect about another potential role, reteaming with Jackson on The Hobbit, though it’s a safe bet she will turn up. “Well, according to IMDB,” she says, coyly, “I’m playing an elf called Itaril. But I’d love to be in it. Pete and I want to work together again. It’s something that hopefully we’ll work out.”

Ronan says she felt like she changed on Hanna. On previous movies, she tended to sit quietly and just do as she was told. But now she feels more invested, more in control of the story she’s helping to tell. “I’m surprised it happened on this film, because I didn’t think it would. But I felt like I walked away from that film more grown up.”

In some ways, she didn’t walk away at all. Hanna hangs with her, and as Ronan steps into adulthood, she wonders about the fate and future of her character. “A lot of people have been asking about whether we should do a sequel or not. I think it would be interesting because she is such a blank canvas.” After a long pause, she adds: “It’s probably a bit dramatic to say she would kill herself, but I actually wonder if she’d be able to handle it. She has no one.”

There’s a line in the movie where Hanna wonders if there are other children like her out there, whose lives were stolen solely to make them killing machines. It sounds silly, but maybe she’d become a kind of distaff Rambo figure, tough as nails, and waging a solo war on behalf of other innocents. Ronan laughs at any comparison between her and Sylvester Stallone. “But she could do something like that, couldn’t she?” Ronan agrees. “She’s really affected, and it’s a beautiful line when she says: ‘Were there other children?’”

Maybe someday, Ronan will return to the character. The future is wide open. All lives are a work in progress, even for a character trained to end them.

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Saoirse Ronan
Forget “Atonement.” Forget “The Lovely Bones.” Fantastic as those performances are, “Hanna” brings Ronan her big breakout role. Describing her as mini-Jason Bourne does not do justice to the incredible feats of physical, mental and emotional strength this young killer accomplishes over the course of this film. Ronan’s already had quite the diverse career, and her step into the action genre is a bold and exciting one.

The Supporting Cast
Eric Bana turns in a reliably compelling performance as Hanna’s mentor and father, though it’s Cate Blanchett as the wicked Marissa Wiegler who steals the show. The spread of thoroughly evil characters in Blanchett’s resume are few and far between, and her turn as the relentlessly ruthless Wiegler is a deeply-cut notch in her accomplished belt of performances. Beyond Bana and Blanchett, major props go out to the other supporting players from Tom Hollander as the whistling sadist Isaacs to the true-to-today’s-youth-culture performance from Jessica Barden.

The Action
Make no mistake—though “Hanna” plays with many genres and storytelling motifs, it is fully populated by frenetic violence, intriguing espionage and impossible feats of power. It’s an eye-popping visual ride that director Joe Wright handles with surprising expertise, especially given his reputation a period piece filmmaker. Just as “Hanna” marks a bold new career move for Ronan, Wright proves here that he’s a force to be reckoned with in the action arena.

The Chemical Brothers
Have you heard that soundtrack? It’s brilliant, isn’t it? Now imagine that very same score humming and thumping beneath and above the surface of numerous sequences where the hell-bent Hanna efficiently and decisively tears her way through African and European landscapes. Need I say more?

The Complexity
“Hanna” is not a simple film. From genre-bending to visual trickery, this is a movie that blends many different elements of cinema into one wholly unique package. As Ronan herself explains: “I came out of the film and I kind of thought, what have I just seen? It was amazing. My heart was pumping. The music was so heavy the whole way through. And I still had all the characters in my head. But what the hell had I just seen?” Indeed, “Hanna” is not forgettable. It’s the kind of movie that sticks with you for the rest of the night, long into the weekend and then some. I won’t speak for you, but that’s more than enough reason to earn my ticket money.

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I’ve added the captures from Saoirse’s interview on Young Hollywood and you can watch the interview here. Thanks to Caro for the link.

“It was rigorous, but it was great,” Ronan told MTV News of her training process. “I trained for about two months before we started shooting, and I learnt new skills like knife fighting, stick fighting, how to shoot a gun, martial arts. There was a style designed by Jeff Amada, who’s the stunt coordinator, and it was created specifically for the character of Hanna. It was based on the strength and energy and body type and things like that. We worked on that every single day, and I felt like I was starting to walk differently. I’d hold myself differently. I felt stronger, just after a few weeks. It was amazing. It was a great way to focus.”

“I didn’t think I couldn’t do it, but I wanted to do my best,” Ronan said of tackling such an action-heavy role. “I’m a bit of a perfectionist, I guess, so I pushed myself quite a bit. I had a personal trainer to push me quite a bit as well. It was probably the most preparation I’ve ever done for a film, definitely the most physical preparation.”

“I think he held back a little bit, because he was fighting a little girl,” she said. “But I had a little voice in my ear — maybe it was Joe Wright, I don’t know — and he said, ‘Just go for it! Just do it!’ So I went for it. You just gotta do it.”

And don’t expect her to feel guilty about it, either. “It was good fun, kicking the Hulk’s ass!” she laughed.

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“I’m so boring,” she laughed when I asked her for an update on her “Hobbit” status. “Nothing’s confirmed, but I know that [Jackson and his team have] been working on the script really hard and I think they’re going to introduce a few more characters, so we’ll have to wait and see.”

Saoirse, who previously collaborated with Jackson on “The Lovely Bones,” said that she would love to go back down to New Zealand to work on the fantasy films. “I love New Zealand. It’s amazing — it’s so far away from Ireland, which is where I live, but it’s like a home away from home,” she explained. “I’d love to go back down there. And like you said, everybody is so excited about ‘The Hobbit.’ Everybody can’t wait to see it. There are so many great people involved, especially the cast, so give me a job, please!”

Something tells me that after people start seeing “Hanna” this weekend, Saoirse won’t have to do much begging for jobs. Still, if she does make her way to Middle Earth, she already has her eye on which mythical creature she’d like to play: “You know, I think the elves are quite elegant. I’ve always fancied being with them.”

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Rumors have pegged Saoirse for a supporting role in Wright’s developing adaptation of Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina,” with the director himself admitting that he’d like her to join the film. But as of now, Ronan says she’s not a part of the project.

“Well, nothing… not really,” she answered when asked if there was truth to her involvement in “Anna Karenina” (a title that I can’t correctly pronounce, it seems). Disappointing news for many, as Ronan and Wright make a heck of a team, and the classic novel would provide the young actress with a great environment to test those chops even further.

Still, she’s not closing the door on the possibility entirely: “There’s a lot of things going on right now and nothing has really been confirmed. So we’ll see.”

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Saoirse was on G4′s Attack of the Show, screencaps have been added to the gallery.