At only 24, the Irish actor has already had three Oscar nominations. On the eve of the release of her new film, in which she plays Mary Queen of Scots, she reflects on her country’s changing social landscape and her habit of playing oddballs
In a hotel room somewhere in London, Saoirse Ronan lies on a sofa, her back rigid against one of its arms, her legs straight out in front of her. She looks a bit like a doll: one that has joints at its hips, but not at its knees. “Sorry,” she says, seemingly unable to get up as I offer her my hand. “It’s these clothes! They’re not mine, and I can’t walk in them.” In an interview she gave not so long ago, Ronan insisted that away from the film sets and the red carpets, she looks a bit like a mother of one who’s “gone mad” in Anthropologie. Her mufti comprises “a lot of knit and some pink slacks that are very comfy”. Not today, though. Today, she is straight out of the last days of disco: her high-waisted, flared jeans are tighter than tight; her vertiginous velvet platforms are encrusted with coloured crystals. To get from where she is to the bottles of mineral water that are arranged on a table less than half a yard away, she could really do with wheels, or some kind of winch.
Not that she isn’t used to this stuff: the restrictions of costume. In her latest film, Mary Queen of Scots, her skirts could hardly be bigger, nor her wigs more elaborate. Did she have to be lowered into her dresses? As I watched, distracted by her latest ruff or some gorgeous little bodice of finest navy corduroy, this was something I occasionally wondered about. “Well, you’re not far wrong,” she says. “Sometimes we did, yes. It would take 45 minutes to get dressed, and then hair and makeup for an hour and a half. Alex [Alexandra Byrne, the film’s costume designer] didn’t want us to crease our skirts, so she had these little swivel stools for us: we would pick up our hoops, swing our legs over it, and then drop the skirt right over it. That way, we got to sit down. But of course you use the feeling the clothes give you. Sometimes, you fight the restriction. Other times, you move with it, in a new way. Wayne McGregor [the choreographer] worked with us on movement, and for me that was the most essential part of our prep: how we’d move in a public setting, and in a private one.”
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