Saoirse Ronan Talks Living In A Brexit World, Lensed By Erik Madigan Heck For Harper's Bazaar UK February 2019
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Actor Saorise Ronan is styled by Leith Clark in ‘The Queen & I’ , promoting Ronan’s current role as Mary Queen of Scots. Photographer Erik Madigan Heck is behind the lens at Hammond Castle Museum in Glouster, Mass USA for a story in Harper’s Bazaar UK February 2019./ Makeup by Sam Addington; hair by Jordan M
Nominated for Oscars in ‘Atonement’, ‘Brooklyn’, and ‘Lady Bird’ at age 13, Saoirse Ronan assumes her role as the Queen who might have been at age 24. Ronan talks to Erica Wagner about British monarchs, Irish borders and whether history will repeat itself in the age of Brexit As for the expected #MeToo convo, Ronan, the actor credits her mother, who was very involved in the development of her acting career, as keeping her safe.
Saorise Ronan On #MeToo
“I don’t know what would have happened if she [Ronan’s mother] hadn’t been around,” Ronan tells Wagner . “I’m sure I would have been exposed to that quite a bit, but she just protected me from all that.”
“I wasn’t unaware that there were people in the industry who abused their power, or who were seedy or untrustworthy,” she explains. “But because of her I was never a victim and I’m very, very thankful.”
Relating to Mary Queen of Scots in a Brexit Moment
Perhaps this is the perfect moment, as we teeter on the brink of Brexit, to consider Mary and her place in history. Born in Scotland, raised in France, with a claim to the English throne: monarch, woman, wife, mother – of a son, James, who would finally unite the two kingdoms of Scotland and England – she was a woman with a multiplicity of identities. We seem to be living in a time when people are being pushed into describing themselves as one thing and one thing only: British or European, to take just a single example. Ronan’s portrait of Mary is of someone who didn’t see those choices as necessary; the pressures came from outside, not from within.
