For two months before shooting began on this month’s action thriller Hanna, 17-year-old Saoirse Ronan endured a daily four-hour regimen of martial arts and weight lifting to play a girl trained by her father—a former Central Intelligence Agency operative (Eric Bana)—to assassinate a top CIA official (Cate Blanchett). It’s not the first time Ronan has been called upon to portray a kid with very adult challenges. In Atonement, for which she earned an Academy Award nomination, she played 13-year-old Briony Tallis, whose rape allegation dooms the love affair between Keira Knightley and James McAvoy. In Peter Jackson’s The Lovely Bones, she was 14-year-old Susie Salmon, who narrates her own murder investigation from beyond the grave. Yet to Ronan’s surprise, she found some childlike elements in the character of Hanna. “At first I thought, This is going to be a badass kid,” says the Irish actress. “But she turned into something else, which was actually quite innocent.” Although Hanna is very much an action movie (set to a thumping Chemical Brothers score), it’s also a coming-of-age story, to which Ronan can relate. “I’m still figuring out who I am,” she admits.

Three more outtakes from LA Times photoshoot have been added!

At only 16, Saoirse Ronan already has 9 films and an Oscar nomination under her belt. But spend a few minutes with her while she’s munching on french fries and lounging barefoot, and you’ll see that this Irish actress is actually refreshingly normal. From geeking out over Lady Gaga to showing off her favorite Miu Miu brogues, the almost-17-year old is totally charming. In other words, we were totally relieved to find that she’s the exact opposite of her scary hit-girl alter ego in the new action movie, Hanna. We caught up with Saoirse the day of the film’s New York premiere.

So the premiere for Hanna is tonight. Are you pumped?
Yeah, I’m ready for everyone to see it! We’ve had so many screenings and Q&A’s, and the reaction has been pretty great. I’ll be interested to see the response.

What drew you to the film originally?
The whole project seemed a really exciting thing to be a part of. It was very well-written, and the writer, Seth Lochead, was only 24. I liked the fact that the character was different than other action heroines than I’d seen before. She’s weird, a bit of a misfit, and quite alien as well. She’s just now experiencing all these things that we’ve had our whole life to experience. Joe Wright [the director] got on board soon after I did.

Hanna is basically this teen killing machine. How was it playing such an intense role?
It was brilliant. It was one of the best exercises you could have as an actor. She’s been in isolation her whole life, and I’ve got to play this girl who’s seeing the world through very fresh eyes and quite fascinated and shocked by everything. She never really knew the difference between beauty and ugliness and she wasn’t prejudiced and everything. She’s a blank slate and you can paint whatever you want on her.

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Was it difficult to detach yourself from her each day?
No, actually, it wasn’t. When we had physical scenes that would usually take the whole day, it would take some unwinding.

What was the hardest thing you had to go through physically?
There was this shot in the beginning of the film, it’s close-up of me. I’m running across a frozen lake and sprinting about 400 meters and it was minus 25 degrees out. I get to the end, and I’m like, “I’ve got it, I’m about to faint, I can’t do anymore!” And then Joe says, “Yeah, we’re just going to do that one more time…need to catch something.” So we had to do it again!

How often do you come to NYC?
I was actually born in the Bronx, but moved to Ireland when I was 3 ½. It’s weird, it actually feels familiar. I feel like I’ve been here before.

What are your favorite places to shop?
I love Urban Outfitters and Topshop! Both stores are really close to each other each other in Dublin, and I always go.

What do you do when you’re not filming?
When the weather is nice, I like to go to the river. Shopping is nice for a few hours, but then I get tired and my back starts to hurt. I feel old! I just like hanging in the city, really. I love Dublin. I go to a lot of concerts.

Who’s your favorite person you’ve seen live?
I looooove Gaga. I’ve seen her live twice; I’m a total groupie. I saw her in Berlin and also about a week and a half ago in LA. My mom and dad didn’t know what to get me for my birthday, so I was like, “Listen, Gaga’s playing in LA….” So I went, and I dressed up; you feel under-dressed if you don’t. The LA concert was her 25th birthday, and at the end of the gig they brought in a cake, and everyone sang to her- it was great.

Last question: how was it bleaching your eyebrows for the movie?
It was weird! They totally paled me out by bleaching my eyebrows and the tips of my eyelashes, and I had a wig. After a while I’d forgotten I had bleached eyebrows and I’d always get looks in Berlin and stuff. I looked like a different person.

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I’ve added three more outtakes from the LA Times photoshoot.

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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Thanks to Book My Show via missbones.tumblr.com for this brand new photoshoot of Saoirse.

I’ve replaced the tagged photos of a photoshoot from 2009 with untagged ones.

46 stunning outtakes from Lorenzo Agius’s photoshoot have been released. As the photos have been featured in several magazine and I’ve uploaded them into different folders. So, I decided to put all the outtakes into a new folder. It would be easier for you guys to browser.

I just came across with this stunning new photohsoot of Saoirse from last year.

I’ve uploaded all photoshoots of Saoirse to the new gallery. So be sure check them out.