“There was nothing”: Saoirse Ronan’s fear of becoming a washed-up actor at 18
Rightfully, the conversation about age in Hollywood is getting louder and louder. More women in the industry are speaking out about the issue of ‘ageing out’ or how roles seem to get less dynamic the older a performer gets. For Saoirse Ronan, that issue hit early.
“The shelf life of actresses when I first came on the scene was about five years,” Cate Blanchett said to Business Insider. When she started to work, she saw that amazing performers getting their first roles when they were maybe in their 20s, and then by their 30s, they were left out in the cold.
Kirsten Dunst also spoke on the issue, saying, “There’s definitely less good roles for women my age”. After spending her younger years playing such a broad spread of dynamic, interesting women, the only roles that seemed to be coming her way as she aged were things like ‘the sad mom’, which she had no interest in playing.
Ronan saw all of this from a young age. The Irish actor booked her first feature film when she was 12, where in The Lovely Bones, her harrowing breakout movie, she was freshly 13, and though through her teenage years, she was busy, by the time she hit adulthood, she was actively warned that that might change.
“I’d been warned that as a female actor, I was probably not going to get anything for three or four years at least,” she said, recalling that when she turned 18, she was cautioned that things might quiet down.
She was told that basically, the industry wouldn’t know what to do with her. “There are more films being made now about girls and women, but even six years ago, people didn’t know what to do with an older teenage girl who was about to go into her 20s,” she noted, as in 2013, stories of young women weren’t all the rage. While Greta Gerwig was trying to change that with projects like Frances Ha, it was just a small arthouse flick, and 20-year-olds weren’t all over the big screen.
In her career, Ronan was pushed into a weird limbo where one day she’d still be playing roles that felt childlike, and the next she’d be doing projects like On Chesil Beach or Brooklyn, where she was playing older, more mature characters, such that for a solid moment, she thought it had all come true.
“I’d been told by older actors: ‘You’re grand now, but when you get to 18 there won’t be anything’, and there wasn’t,” she said, emphasising, “There was nothing”. The quiet period had her terrified, scared that she was going to be washed up before she’d even begun and that her child-acting career wouldn’t translate into an adult one.
But then three saving graces landed: the first was a call from Wes Anderson casting her in The Grand Budapest Hotel, the second was a meeting with Greta Gerwig who would bring Ronan into her world, and the third was Mary Queen of Scots and the five years it took to bring that film to the screens, padding out what could have been a troublesome time.
