50+ outtakes from Saoirse’s last year USA Today shoot are now available for your viewing in the gallery.

I found two never seen photoshoots. Also, Guardian.co.uk posted an interview with Saoirse.

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.”

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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.

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HANGING from a piece of twine around her neck was a small, green painted bone. “I call this my lovely bone,” said Rose McIver, the New Zealand actress who plays Saoirse Ronan’s sister in “The Lovely Bones.”

Ms. McIver, 22, had arrived at the Griffith Observatory here fashionably on time. That evening she would fly to New Zealand. She hoped it would be easier than entering the United States. “My fingerprints didn’t read on the machine because I’d used some really intense bleach at home,” she said. “At least I got the blood out of my carpet.”

The macabre has grown surprisingly commonplace to Ms. McIver and Ms. Ronan, the 15-year-old star of “The Lovely Bones.” Ms. Ronan, whose first name is pronounced “sur-sha,” plays Susie Salmon, the murder, rape and dismemberment victim who narrates the story after her death, from a lovely fantasy world filled with beautiful clouds, mountains and trees.

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She and Ms. McIver developed a fast friendship on the set. As they walked into the observatory, they held hands, leaned into each other and talked. Following them were a publicist for the film, Ms. McIver’s agent, Ms. Ronan’s parents and the girls’ hairdresser (hey, it never hurts to be prepared).

Like a schoolgirl on a field trip, Ms. Ronan stopped at the first exhibit and dutifully read the explanatory plaque. Then, with her cheek resting on her fist, she stared at the pit and the pendulum whose swing would knock down a peg every seven minutes.

Ms. McIver speed-walked through Sun and Stars Paths, Moon Phases, and Day and Night, while Ms. Ronan read all the information panels. In Eclipses, they caught up with each other.

“All right,” Ms. McIver told her friend in her New Zealand accent.

“All right,” Ms. Ronan repeated in her Irish one.

“All right,” Ms. McIver corrected.

If they sounded different, it must have been be akin to those sounds that only dogs can hear. “We’re practicing each other’s accents,” said Ms. Ronan, who was raised in Ireland.

“We look quite similar,” Ms. McIver said, “and eventually we’re going to remake ‘The Parent Trap’ and swap lives.”

They headed outside to look through the telescope. “All I can see is my eyelashes,” Ms. McIver said. Ms. Ronan’s father deposited 50 cents. When Ms. McIver tried again, Ms. Ronan put her hand in front of the lens in the sun and said, “Can you see the stars now?”

Moving into the Café at the End of the Universe for fruit salad and chips, the girls talked about their childhoods.

“When I was younger, I used to collect rocks,” Ms. Ronan said. “What a nerdy thing to do.”

“I used to try to sell rocks,” Ms. McIver said. “I was a poor 7-year-old.”

Ms. Ronan was 13 when she made “The Lovely Bones” and 12 when she made “Atonement,” in which her character witnesses what she believes is a rape.

Both times, Ms. Ronan said, she stayed away from the novels from which the movies were adapted. Only recently did she read “The Lovely Bones,” signed for her by its author, Alice Sebold.

As for “Atonement,” “I read the first page a few years ago and the vocabulary was too advanced for me,” she said. “And now, I just don’t have the time. I only read scripts.”

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Saoirse attended The Kari Feinstein Golden Globes Style Lounge and photos have been already added to the gallery. Also, there are two new set of photoshoots. Enjoy!

“I feel like a ’70s chick now,” quipped 15-year-old Oscar nominee Saoirse Ronan, adding she loves the era’s music, a typical teen’s enthusiasm for the newly discovered in her voice.

The young Irish actress (her name is pronounced “Sur-shah,” but friends call her “Sursh”) with the arresting ice-blue eyes, immersed herself in the sounds of the mid-’70s for her role as 14-year-old murder victim Susie Salmon in The Lovely Bones.

The movie opens Friday.

The film, directed by The Lord of the Rings franchise helmer Peter Jackson, is set in 1973 Pennsylvania. It’s based on Alice Sebold’s 2002 bestseller about a girl who watches her family, and the neighbour who killed her, from the afterlife.

“Fleetwood Mac is one of my favourite bands,” Ronan said passionately as she curled up on a Yorkville hotel room couch with her co-star Rose McIver to talk about The Lovely Bones.

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New Zealand native McIver, 21, plays her younger sister, Lindsey, who ages from 11 to 19 in the film.

Both actresses embraced the unfamiliar world of polyester pants and David Bowie for the movie, which has a soundtrack by English composer Brian Eno, who made his mark in the ’70s with Roxy Music.

“I’m fascinated with the music – not the fashion, but the style where it started off from. It was a very interesting era, when things started to become bold,” said Ronan, her Irish lilt coming as a surprise after hearing her mastery of a middle-America accent onscreen.

Ronan pointed out that teens today tend to have common ways of expressing themselves, thanks to globalization and the pervasive reach of popular TV shows.

That wasn’t the case in the 1970s, “and because I’m not like that anyway, I felt it was very easy to go there. I feel like I’m not like one of those (modern) kids.”

The Lovely Bones was shot two years ago, when Ronan was an unknown 13-year-old actress. All that changed in 2008 when she was nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her portrayal of Briony Tallis in Atonement.

Both Ronan and McIver needed to do some homework to play typical American teens.

“I had the luxury of spending a few days at an American high school,” said McIver. “Just seeing the cafeteria, and we went to a homecoming game and saw American football being played, and all these things that were completely foreign to me.”

“We don’t have those kind of high schools back home,” added Ronan.

McIver also relied on her own diaries, kept through her school years, to help get her in touch with different stages of Lindsey’s life. Physical alterations, like pigtails and braces, helped her look younger, along with medical tape that was used to flatten her womanly curves.

“Poor thing, I felt so bad for her,” Ronan said.

“Especially during the running scenes,” added McIver with a laugh, mock-gasping.

Susie, of course, doesn’t age over the eight years that spans her family’s grief and desperate attempts to find her killer and her remains.

Jackson has crafted an elaborate series of settings for the almost-heaven place Susie inhabits, where the scenery shifts from meadows and woods to fanciful places that challenge the imagination.

Shooting those scenes demanded much from Ronan. She was often acting in front of a bare blue screen – digital effects and scenery were added later – and had to rely solely on Jackson’s descriptions to help her imagine her surroundings.

“We would play music every single day. It was very important and reflected the mood of the scene and it helped more than anything else,” said Ronan, adding the playlist varied among ’70s hits and albums, and classical.

“Pete would talk to me in between takes and he would describe what was going on and I would react to it,” Ronan added.

So what did she think when she saw the final version of The Lovely Bones, when her moving to music and Jackson’s direction meshed with his vision?

“Oh, I was completely blown away,” said Ronan. “The in between was very, very beautiful.”

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The Globe and Mail posted a new interview about Saoirse.

Saoirse Ronan is a special effect all by herself. She’s only 15 years old, and she looks it, dressed in jeans and a shrunken striped cardigan for an interview in Toronto on Thursday. Her limbs are long and skinny, her silky blond hair is a little staticky, and her oval face is pale and fine-boned. Born in New York but raised in Ireland – her first name, pronounced “Sur-shuh,” means “freedom,” and her father is the actor Paul Ronan ( Veronica Guerin ) – she speaks with a musical Irish accent that’s unlike any she has used on screen.

But it’s the look in her sky-blue, almond-shaped eyes that’s the real grabber: intelligence coupled with an old-soul otherworldliness. The combination made her perfect to play both Benji McGarvie, a Victorian-era con girl, in 2007′s Death Defying Acts , and Briony Tallis, a budding writer in Atonement (also 2007), which netted Ronan a best-supporting-actress Oscar nomination at age 13.

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It also makes her ideal to play Susie Salmon, a Pennsylvania teenager who watches the aftermath of her murder from her personal heaven, in Peter Jackson’s The Lovely Bones , opening Friday. In the film, based on the best-selling novel by Alice Sebold, Susie exists in a boundless, cotton-candy, computer-generated afterworld. She’s only dimly aware of how she died – we see her life in flashbacks – and unable to comfort her grieving parents (Mark Wahlberg and Rachel Weisz), grandmother (Susan Sarandon) and sister Rose McIver, who was interviewed with Ronan. (The two snuggled sweetly together on a sofa, finishing the other’s thoughts; at one point Ronan idly played with a strand of McIver’s hair).

Ronan expertly communicates both Susie’s human panic and her post-mortem wafting, even though she had to do much of her acting alone, in front of a blue screen. “They showed me a bit of artwork of how it would look, and it was described pretty well in the script,” she said. “And during the takes Pete would talk to me about what was going on around me, so I was able to react to that. When I look at it now, there’s quite a few scenes where it’s all about the landscape, how things are shifting and changing. But when I was doing it, it was just me.”

“Quite a few scenes” is an understatement. Jackson is an intensely visual director (he previously lavished his paint box on King Kong and The Lord of the Rings trilogy), and at times his fantastical heaven can overwhelm what’s happening down on earth. It’s a problem a lot of directors seem to be having these days: The wealth of what’s available to them via CGI – like a bottomless box of toys – may actually be distracting them from the story the toys are allegedly being deployed to tell.

Look at Avatar , for example. Writer/director James Cameron’s 3-D extravaganza may well break the $1.84-billion worldwide box-office record set by 1997′s Titanic , also by Cameron. (He was the first director to have a movie cross the $1-billion mark, and now he’s got two.) But though Avatar ‘s visual effects have a mind-boggling depth and density, its plot about a primitive society threatened by military-industrial forces is almost 100-per-cent recycled. (As a friend put it, “They spent $300-million, and that’s the best story they could come up with?”)

“When I look at it now, there’s quite a few scenes where it’s all about the landscape, how things are shifting and changing. But when I was doing it, it was just me.”

Or take The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus . Terry Gilliam is another voraciously visual director, and his latest is crammed with psychedelic fantasy worlds. Unfortunately, Gilliam forgot to imagine a coherent story. Key plot points are mumbled in master shots, and characters travel willy-nilly between states of being, until there are no stakes to care about. Halfway through I gave up trying to force it to make sense, and resigned myself to watching a slide show of images rather than a movie.

Regular readers of this column know how much I loathed Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen , the top-grossing film of ’09 until Avatar came along. Regarding its attention to visuals versus story, let’s just say that even if you put a gun to my head, I could not tell you who the Fallen were, much less the nature of their Revenge. And I bet that most people who saw Fast & Furious and G.I. Joe: the Rise of Cobra (which each grossed over $150-million) couldn’t tell me their plots, either.

It’s almost as if big-budget directors have decided that story is beneath them – that since character development and dialogue don’t cost any extra money to film, and since any sap with a credit card and an HD camera can convey a narrative, coherence is something only the little guys need to worry about.

Several mega-directors are addressing this problem by buying established stories to display their trinkets in. Guy Ritchie tarted up Sherlock Holmes with a bunch of CGI, as did Robert Zemeckis in 2009′s animated, 3-D A Christmas Carol . As well, all the trailers that played before Avatar were old dogs using new tricks. Percy Jackson & The Olympians: The Lightning Thief , due in February, retools ancient Greek myths. Robin Hood , due in May, soups up its familiar story with epic battle scenes courtesy of director Ridley Scott and star Russell Crowe (the duo behind Gladiator ). Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland , due in March, applies 3-D and star Johnny Depp to the already trippy tale. (Alice’s phrase “stuff and nonsense” seems apt here: The more stuff a film has, the more its story can be nonsense.)

Regardless of how prominent the visuals are in The Lovely Bones , however, as an actor Ronan felt well cared for by Jackson. He arranged for the cast to spend two weeks together before filming so they could jell as a family. They went bowling, and sang karaoke at the wrap party – though Jackson spent most of that night playing video games.

“Pete is a big kid,” Ronan said. “We went to his house, and they do this laser tag thing. He plays games. He’s got a passion for having fun.” On set, he’d leap to his feet, cup of tea always in hand, to act out scenes for Ronan and McIver. “He’s always there. He gives you so much,” Ronan said.

Most importantly for Ronan, Jackson decided that one set of images would not be in his movie: the scene of Susie’s rape and murder. “From the off, Pete didn’t want to make a movie where you see a child being sexually assaulted and murdered,” she said. “It’s happened a lot in movies where it completely overwhelms the story, and the story is so much more than that. That was the deal-maker for me.”

What good storytellers know – and what CGI-lovers sometimes forget – is that what you don’t show can be as powerful as what you do.

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Added a new set photoshoot which Saoirse had done during a promotion tour for The Lovely Bones.

Just found few more gorgeous outtakes of Saoirse from Black Book and Nylon. Also, Thanks to Kelly for sending me a new set photoshoot of Saoirse. Enjoy!

When Saoirse Ronan walks into the Old Poland Bakery in Brooklyn’s Greenpoint neighborhood, the 15-year-old actress looks every bit the schoolgirl. That is, if she went to school. Since her Oscar-nominated performance in Atonement two years ago, Ronan has been too busy to attend regular classes. “I tried to go back recently,” she says, “but I felt like I was in a zoo. I felt like there were 20 kids crowding me, teasing me.”
Still, all things considered, Ronan’s life has been fairly normal. Her parents travel with her wherever she goes. She refuses to move to Hollywood and doesn’t much care for fame. “I try not to read much press about me,” she says in her sophisticated Irish brogue. “Most people are nice, but then you have really mean people who are like, ‘Who’s prettier: Saoirse or Dakota Fanning?’ I hate when they compare.”

This Christmas, Ronan co-stars in Peter Jackson’s adaptation of Alice Sebold’s bestselling novel The Lovely Bones, as the film’s brutally raped and murdered narrator. Ronan, who will also appear with Colin Farrell in The Way Back, Peter Weir’s upcoming war drama about escapees from a Siberian gulag, says it was difficult to film the scenes in which Susie looks over her family from the afterlife. “I was surrounded by a blue-screen most of the time, so I had no idea what Peter’s heaven was going to look like. My family is Catholic, but I don’t know if I believe in a god.” Before Ronan has the chance to get into her personal theology, her lunch arrives, and her otherworldly eyes light up. “I’m so excited!” she says, finally sounding her age. “I’ve never tried chicken noodle soup before.”

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What was your initial reaction when watching the film? Did you have any idea what it might look like?
I knew that whatever happened, Pete was going to do something incredible with it, because he always does with all of his movies. The waiting process to see this movie has been almost two years. But since I hadn’t seen it until recently, I’d never really thought of it as a movie, as a finished film.

How do you try to understand a character like Susie Salmon, someone whose life experience is so vastly different from yours?
When you put it like that, it actually sounds quite difficult. But I’m pretty good at understanding people in everyday life, and that’s one of the most important things about becoming someone else on camera. I also think it’s important to have a good relationship with your director. If you don’t have that then I don’t think you can portray the character in its entirety, the way it deserves to be played. Although Pete’s style of directing is different from any other director I’ve worked for, it just works. He talked to me about loss. It wasn’t exactly about death, but more about having something taken from you and never getting it back.

The Lovely Bones is an adaptation of a fictional story, but it’s also based, however loosely, on Alice Sebold’s life. Were you conscious of that during filming?
I wasn’t really. For me, Susie was completely separate from Alice. I wanted to create for Susie her own identity. She became a part of me for two months, not in a method acting kind of way but as if became her friend. I knew everything about her, and how she would react to something.

Did you discuss the story or your character with Alice?
I haven’t met Alice. I think they invited her on set, but she never came. I thought it was great that she didn’t want to get in the way of Pete’s interpretation of the story. It seemed to me, from what I heard, that she really respected him and his vision.

Were you able to leave the tragedy on set?
Sometimes I’d come home from work and get really upset because I was so close to Susie. As a human, as someone with a heart, of course I got upset. But I tried my best to leave it there.

Tell me about your working relationship with Stanley Tucci, who plays your murderer in the film.
Stanley is one of the sweetest guys. He is very kind and funny, really easy to be around. And it was important for us to be that comfortable with each other in order to go into those uncomfortable scenes. After we finished the cornfield scene [during which Stanley’s character murders Susie Salmon], I went over to him and gave him a hug. He had his arm around me and we walked off and had a chat.

What’s it like when you’re at home? The Irish are a proud group of people.
I mean this in the most modest way, but everyone loves Ireland. We’ve got a very good reputation and even though we’ve had some trouble in the past, I think that’s made us more proud of who we are. We’ve really fought for our country and for freedom. I have to say that the stereotypes people have set for us kind of annoy me. Sure, there are a lot of people who drink in Ireland, but there are also a lot of people who drink in Britain and everywhere in the world.

But how normal is your life at home? Have you been affected by fame?
It’s not as normal as it was before I started acting. I’m quite well known in Ireland, so people recognize me.

Does that happen when you walk down the street?
Yeah.

Has that started to happen in America?
It’s happened a few times, but America is a lot bigger than Ireland. A lot of people know me over there. It’s quite odd when you’re walking through the town you grew up in and people start to look at you differently, people that I know, people that I don’t know, or people that I’ve seen on the street before and recognize. I’m really happy that my acting career has taken off, but at the same time, I’m not doing it for fame.

How has your film success affected your school life?
It’s changed quite a bit. When I was nominated for an Oscar, I was working on Lovely Bones and I couldn’t start secondary school with the rest of the kids. I had planned to go back to school after Easter but it didn’t really work out. I’m not going to delve too much into it, but it just didn’t work out at all, for me at least.

Because the other kids knew about the movies you were in?
Yeah, I felt like I was in a zoo. I felt like there were 20 kids crowding me, teasing me. It was just a bit mean. There were some good kids, too.

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