In the immigrant saga “Brooklyn,” opening in Philadelphia in mid-November, actress Saoirse Ronan plays a young woman who leaves her family behind to start a new life in New York.
Fitting in isn’t easy for the Irish lass, though, and there’s plenty of blood, sweat and tears along the route to adulthood.
Ronan could definitely relate.
The actress was approached about the movie when she’d just turned 19 and was still living at home with her folks and largely thought of as a teen star. Two years later, the 21-year-old actress is not only the owner of a home in the Dublin suburb of Howth but she’s portraying an adult onscreen for the first time.
“[Playing a grown-up in ‘Brooklyn’] was that kind of step that everyone needs to make if you start out young,” says the actress who landed an Oscar nomination at age 13 for “Atonement.”
“I felt quite ready to play a young woman who was in the same sort of place personally that I was in.”
At times, “Brooklyn” provided almost too good a fit.
“[Director] John [Crowley] came along [with the script] when I was about 19, and I was thinking about moving away from home but I hadn’t done it yet.
“But in the time that I had met John and signed on to do the film with him, I had made that trip. I had moved away and experienced that homesickness that [my character] feels.
“I loved the script originally … but it became something else entirely by the time we actually shot it. It became so personal, sometimes too personal. There were actually a couple of scenes where I had to step back and leave set because it just reminded me of something that was personal to me. I cried quite a bit.”
In the movie, which scripter Nick Hornby (“About a Boy”) adapted from a novel by Colm Toibin, Ronan plays Eilis Lacey , a young woman who emigrates from Ireland to New York in the 1950s.
Initially, she can barely cope with the pervasive loneliness. But after meeting an Italian-American plumber (Emory Cohen), she begins to blossom. Just as she’s starting to settle into her new life in America, a family tragedy pulls her back to Ireland.
Even though she marries Cohen in a secret ceremony right before she leaves, she finds herself feeling disconnected from him after she arrives back home. The longer she stays in the Ireland, the more she’s drawn to an Irish man (Domhnall Gleeson) she fancied before she moved to New York.
Ronan is in nearly every scene of the film and, at first, felt the responsibility a bit daunting.
“It was really terrifying and I was convinced I was going to mess it up,” says the actress who pronounces her first name SEER-sha. “I would talk to my mom every night, even when we were down in Ireland, and I would say to her, I don’t think I can do this. I don’t think I can do a good job. I don’t think I can do what they need me to do.’
“But by the end of it, it was as if we’d all run a marathon together, and we had that kind of satisfaction you get when you’ve put everything you have into something.”
The daughter of Irish actor Paul Ronan and his wife Monica, Saoirse was born in the Bronx. When she was three, her parents moved back to County Carlow, Ireland, where she was raised.
As the New York Times pointed out, “Brooklyn” is the first time Ronan is playing a lead role as an Irishwoman.
“It was very important to me to play an Irish person and I really did want to do an Irish film but a good one, and one that I felt really kind of captured who we are,” says Ronan. “I wanted it to be intelligently written and then, on top of that, it needed to have a very well-rounded female character who had depth to her and was interesting.”
Ronan believes “Brooklyn” more than fit the bill. The actress was particularly thrilled to be playing a character still trying to figure out what she wants to do with her life.
“Eilis is at an age when you start to take hold of what matters to you and what you want out of your work and your relationships and your friendships and your morals and all these different things,” says Ronan.
“And I think that is what New York gives her. And it is all very nuanced, which is my favorite thing. I think it is great when you see a film like that, all very subtle.
“For instance, you see it in the clothes that she wears and how she speaks to men. By the time, she comes back home to Ireland, she’s very different … Ireland has stayed the same. Nothing has changed. But she has.”
In many ways, the men in Eilis’ life represent the countries they hail from. The movie asks: should she stay in Ireland with Gleeson and help care for her mother or return to New York and a brash husband and job in a department store?
” It comes down to her going through enough life experience to be able to make a choice, to be empowered enough and experienced enough at life to make a choice, and that is really what the movie is about,” says Ronan.
“It’s not like we have this woman who is the damsel in distress and we have the bad guy and the good guy. She needs to go through quite a bit before she’s grown up enough to decide what she wants.”
Some audiences at Sundance were in tears at Eilis’ decision but Ronan thinks that the ending is as it should be.
“I think the beauty of the movie is that … you don’t know whether she’s made the right choice or not,” notes the actress. “We’ll never know and she won’t know but the fact that she’s made [a choice] is what the film is about.”
Ronan was bitten by the acting bug early. She can still remember accompanying her father to the sets of movies like “The Devil’s Own” and “Veronica Guerin,” in which he appeared.
But even after Ronan began starring in a series of Hollywood films such as “The Lovely Bones,” “Hanna” and “The Host,” she never moved to Los Angeles. The actress credits her Irish upbringing with helping her keep her feet on the ground.
“I think it was definitely because of where I lived [that I stayed grounded] and also because the roles I did were not overly commercial,” she says. “I didn’t do children’s films which would have lead to a lot of exposure, I guess.
“I wasn’t really in that [show-biz] world … and also my parents are very down to earth and very real about things.”
Ronan says her mom never let her get too full of herself, and always reminded her that fame can be fleeting.
“My mom was, like, ‘alright, this may not last forever, and you might go through phases where you might not work.’ My mom has no tolerance for bullshit, basically, and she kind of passed that on to me. And I think that has been a huge tool to dealing with the crap.”
Whatever Ronan is doing, it seems to be working. She’ll follow up her turn in “Brooklyn” with “Stockholm, Pennsylvania,” a drama about a woman who returns home after being kidnapped; “Loving Vincent,” a look at Vincent Van Gogh; and “The Seagull,” an adaption of the famous Anton Chekhov play.
First up, Ronan will make her Broadway debut in a revival of Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible” in the spring of 2016.
“I’m incredibly excited about doing a play,” says the actress. “But it’s so scary and invigorating, it makes you smile.
“I’m really terrified, really scared but I’m looking forward to it. And I really think it’s something that every actor should do.
“My Dad started out in theater and I think when you do theater, you have to strip everything back, and go back to basics. I’m looking forward to doing that kind of exercise.”
