Not every 15-year-old girl gets “Oscar-nominated” placed before her name, but Saoirse Ronan does.

Ronan was nominated for best supporting actress as Briony Tallis, whose lie sets off a series of tragedies in 2007′s “Atonement.” She has a bigger role in “The Lovely Bones,” Peter Jackson’s adaptation of Alice Sebold’s well-loved novel, which opens Friday. She plays Susie Salmon, the girl who, killed at the beginning, observes her family’s life without her from the In-Between. Ronan spoke recently (in an Irish accent; born in New York, she grew up in Ireland) about the film and the book.

Question: It’s an obvious question, but had you read the book?

Answer: No, I hadn’t. I waited till after I made the movie to read the book. I was about 13 when I started to make it, and I had been told that, in particular, the first chapter was a tough read. Everything I needed, really, was in the script. I just wanted to focus on that form of the story. . . . I just didn’t feel like it was the right time for me because of what it was about, and I knew there was more in the book.

Q: When you read it later, did you picture yourself as Susie?

A: Yeah, I kind of did, actually. I’m not really a fast reader, but I read “The Lovely Bones” in three days. I could picture Susie’s bedroom, because I know what it looks like. I was picturing me as Susie. I think I was more connected to it as well, because it almost felt like it was happening to me.

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Q: Were you nervous about playing a character in such a well-known book?

A: Yeah, I was nervous when I was making the film because I was hoping people would like what I was doing and how the film was. It was always something that was in the back of your mind. I wasn’t as aware of it back then, but “Atonement” was such a success as well; I mean the book was. So a lot of people said beforehand, “No way it’s going to be as good as the book.” We kind of proved them wrong.

Q: Did you want to do another movie based on a well-known book?

A: It was kind of coincidental, really. I didn’t mean to pick those type of movies, or even dramatic movies. I would like to do comedy and things like that as well. It just happened that, at the time, the quality scripts I was reading were those. I think it’s always so great to have lots of color, to experiment with those kind of things, and in “Atonement,” especially, we did that a lot.

Q: There is a fair amount of computer-generated imagery in the film, of your character in the In-Between. Is it difficult to act when you can’t see what the audience will later see?

A: It wasn’t too difficult, actually, I think because Pete has experimented with blue screen and CGI before. And this is in no way a CGI movie, either. Well, I don’t think it is. The likes of “Lord of the Rings” and “King Kong,” an awful lot of it was about the action. It was very big, whereas “The Lovely Bones” is a bit more emotional, I suppose. It’s more about the emotions than anything else.

Q: You get the chance to play a lot of emotions.

A: I’m alive, I’m dead, I get to be in a fashion show. She’s not moping around, and she’s constantly trying to contact her father in particular and convict her murderer, and try and come to terms with the fact that she’s dead and watching her sister grow up before her. There’s an awful lot going on while she’s stuck there.

Q: What’s it like to see yourself on-screen?

A: For me it’s been different for every movie that I’ve watched. For some that I didn’t spend as much time on, or maybe didn’t like as much as another one I did, it wouldn’t be that hard to just sit back and accept it as a movie. With “Atonement,” surprisingly – and this wasn’t because I disliked it or anything – I found it very easy to accept that this was Briony Tallis, and this was a film and I could sort of forget that it was something that I worked on. I don’t know why that was. When I saw “The Lovely Bones” – I’ve seen it twice now – although I really was blown away by it, it was beautiful, it was very strange for me to sit back and watch because I had spent so much time on it.

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