Saoirse Ronan, Greta Gerwig’s discreet muse who made a splash by silencing three movie stars (and Graham Norton)

Imagine being a four-time Oscar-nominated, Golden Globe-winning Hollywood actress, considered one of the best performers of her generation, and facing the recurring question in your interviews: “How do you pronounce your name?” That’s what happens to Saoirse Ronan. Born in the Bronx, New York, to Irish immigrant parents, the 30-year-old actress has been answering this question in magazines and from TV presenters (Stephen Colbert, Ellen DeGeneres and many others) for years, always smiling. For those curious, it is pronounced sur-shá and is a Gaelic name meaning “freedom.” Aside from this anecdote, Ronan has worked continuously in the acting industry since she was nine years old and still has two new releases pending before the end of 2024: Blitz, by Steve McQueen, which premieres on November 22 on Apple TV+, in which she plays a mother searching for her son during World War II; and The Outrun — she is also a producer — in which she plays a recovered alcoholic who revisits her past.

However, if Ronan has been in the news in recent weeks, it’s not because of these roles, which have already put her in the running for the next Oscar nominations, but because she silenced four men on an talk show. Ronan went viral at the end of October after her appearance on The Graham Norton Show, where she was accompanied by her friend Paul Mescal and Denzel Washington, on the promotional trail for Gladiator II. Also present was Eddie Redmayne, who said he had learned to use his cell phone as a weapon for self-defense while preparing for his role in the series The Day of the Jackal. The comment proved amusing to the presenter and his guests, who thought it was absurd to defend oneself with a phone. “Who is actually going to think about that?” joked Mescal while doing a simulation. “If someone actually attacked me, I’m not going to go ‘phone!’” he laughed with his colleagues, while Ronan tried, without success, to say something. Finally she managed to interrupt: “That’s what girls have to think about all the time.” And there was silence. “Am I right ladies?” she added with a knowing gesture to the camera and a raised eyebrow as the audience applauded.

The actress’ widely admired intervention has been shared so much on social networks that she herself has been overwhelmed. “The reaction has been wild. It’s definitely not something that I had expected, and I didn’t necessarily set out to make a splash,” she confessed in an interview with Virgin Radio UK. “I do think there’s something really telling about the society that we’re in right now and about how open women want to be with the men in their lives. I think it’s amazing it’s opening a conversation, and hopefully it’s allowing more and more women to just be like: ‘Well, yeah, actually, let’s talk about our experience,’” she added of her timely comment.

Ronan doesn’t pretend to be some sort of feminist spokesperson, but she has spoken out before. In 2019, during the presentation of a Calvin Klein fragrance for which she was the face, her agent told journalists that it was forbidden to ask any direct questions about feminism. A fruitless warning. At the time she was filming Little Women, directed by Greta Gerwig, with whom she had already worked on Lady Bird in 2017. Both roles earned her an Oscar nomination for best actress. She was due to have a cameo in Barbie, Gerwig’s big hit, but in the end she couldn’t participate due to scheduling problems, as it coincided with the filming of The Outrun. “There was a whole character I was going to play — another Barbie. I was gutted I couldn’t do it,” she admitted to People in 2022. And she has another thorn in her side: as a child, she auditioned for the role of Luna Lovegood in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, a role she ultimately lost to Evanna Lynch. “I was too young,” she recently lamented.

With more than two decades of experience in the industry, Ronan is now very clear about which jobs she is interested in accepting and which ones she is not. “Working with Greta [Gerwig], even though she hadn’t directed before Lady Bird, I knew her work and I was a fan. And I think that can really carry you a long way when you are genuinely invested in somebody’s work. I have found the older that I’ve gotten that my relationship with directors is changing. There isn’t the sort of like, dependency in the way there was when I was a child. I have so much more experience now, and I want to be able to collaborate with them without us losing sight of what both of our roles are,” she said in a recent interview with Vanity Fair. She turned down, for example, a role in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, because it limited her availability to shoot The Host, a much less ambitious film in terms of budget. She was also offered the role of Kitty in Anna Karenina, but turned it down to star in Byzantium, an Irish fantasy horror film directed by Neil Jordan. Still, there is one role she’s dying to play above all others: a James Bond villain. “I do think there’s something kind of cool about having a female villain who wants to take him down and doesn’t just want to fall in love with him,” she suggested in the interview.

Thanks to responses such as those, or her appearance on Graham Norton’s show, she has managed to escape the image of the Hollywood pretty girl, despite her canonical beauty, and both the industry and the public take her seriously as the intelligent, mature and mischievous woman that she has shown herself to be on and off screen. Despite walking her first Oscars red carpet at the age of 13, she has also managed to project the image of a star who keeps her feet on the ground. “I remember the stress of trying to find a dress because I didn’t have a stylist,” she recalls of that debut in 2008. “To me, the Oscars at that stage was a TV show. It was something that I had grown up watching at home, and so I was very excited to be involved for that reason. I think my mom getting to meet John Travolta was huge, because my mom is a huge Saturday Night Fever fan. And she went to the cinema to see it 27 times, which is just too much,” she explained with a laugh to Vanity Fair.

Last July, after seven years of dating, Ronan married British actor Jack Lowden, whom she met during the filming of Mary Queen of Scots. They tied the knot in a private ceremony in Scotland that was just as discreet as their relationship, which she didn’t even want to make public at first. “Can I ask if you’re dating the person everyone thinks you’re dating?” a journalist from The Telegraph inquired in 2019. “No,” she replied. On November 8, however, she didn’t mind telling Jimmy Fallon how disappointed she was with her husband for not agreeing to a “cheesy karaoke duet” that she was looking forward to performing. “I wanted to sing Shallow, from A Star Is Born. I want him to be my Bradley and me to be his Gaga. But he doesn’t want to do it. He doesn’t commit. And I wonder: what is marriage for? You know what I mean? What are we doing here?” she joked on The Tonight Show.

The couple live in London, in a £2.5m house they share with their dog, Fran. Little else is known about their private life, beyond what Lowden posts on his Instagram profile: a photo of Ronan from behind walking the dog, another of the couple hiking to some cliffs (she again not facing the camera). Ronan doesn’t use social media, although she tried Twitter in 2009. “I only went on it because Stephen Fry was on it. ‘Cause he was like, ‘Oh, Twitter, it’s fantastic, it’s a quick little thing.’ And because he got on it, I got on it,” she explained in 2018 to The Wrap. But it didn’t last long because she found it “stressful” and that it required “too much work.” “I get why musicians do it, and journalists or people in the public eye. But acting is a different thing, ‘cause you’re not yourself when you’re working. I’m not me in anything that anyone sees me in. So for me then to get on Twitter and go, ‘Oh, I’ve had a terrible day’ or ‘God, I’ve got such a headache,’ I just don’t think people need to see that. And self-promotion has always made me feel really uncomfortable,” she said.

The actress, despite being one of the most acclaimed and sought-after in Hollywood today, doesn’t even feel she is famous. “I still get completely shocked that anyone knows who I am,” she admitted in 2018 to Vogue. “I’m not . . . famous. I just genuinely don’t think I am. Selena Gomez is famous.” Her upcoming projects include the film Bad Apples, in which she plays a teacher who confronts a troubled student, and an adaptation of The Chronicles of Narnia for Netflix directed by Gerwing, which has once again cast her as the main character. Perhaps inspired by her, Ronan herself is trying her hand at directing a short film about which she has not yet revealed much. “There will be women in it — and potentially a dog,” she told Vanity Fair. It seems like an absurd certainty, as if it were not necessary to clarify that there will be a female presence in the project, but Ronan demonstrates once again that there are things that are better remembered out loud so that people can hear them.

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