Saoirse Ronan never misses. Right from her early child performances, through to her recent work, she’s proved one of Ireland’s greatest talents – oft
Saoirse Ronan never misses. Right from her early child performances, through to her recent work, she’s proved one of Ireland’s greatest talents – often playing characters who the audience can root for wholeheartedly, flawed as they may be. See Lady Bird, Jo in Little Women, Rona in The Outrun, or burgeoning detective Constable Stalker in See How They Run. But it’s occasional to see Ronan go full wrong’un, a mode she’s keen to explore going forward.
“I want to go dark,” she emphatically tells Empire. And she wouldn’t mind doing so in one of cinema’s biggest franchises. “I said that I wanted to be a Bond villain and I’m dead serious,” Ronan elaborates. “I think it would be really interesting, having a young female villain. Especially for girls and women, to see someone who can just take all that pent-up anger and direct it somewhere, there’s something interesting in that dramatically. So I would love to do more of that.”
She is, however, playing someone caught in a devilishly gloomy predicament in her latest film Bad Apples – as teacher Maria who, through various means, winds up holding captive a particularly disruptive pupil. And once he’s out of her classroom (and locked in her basement instead) her lessons undeniably become a much happier place. “The whole point, and the reason why the writing is so clever, is that it’s gone past being black and white,” she tells Empire of the film. “I don’t know what I would do in that situation, but I certainly don’t feel like Maria is an out-and-out psychopath. I think she’s the nicest villain you could play.” Next stop: all-out Bond nastiness?
Read Empire’s full Bad Apples story in the Digger issue, on sale Thursday August 17. Pre-order a copy online here. Bad Apples comes to UK cinemas from September 18.
