Saoirse Ronan has broken her silence on a recent incident involving Paul Mescal and Eddie Redmayne on The Graham Norton Show.
Ronan, who was on the show to promote her new film The Outrun went viral for interrupting Mescal and Redmayne as they joked about having been taught how to attack someone with the base of a phone.
Mescal said: “Who is actually going to think about that? If someone actually attacked me, I’m not going to go ‘phone.”’
Whilst the pair joked about this, Ronan tried to speak up twice, before eventually cutting across them to say: “That’s what girls have to think about all the time”.
After an initial moment of awkward silence, she added ‘Am I right, ladies?’, which got a huge response from the crowd.
The exchange has gone viral on Twitter, with Ronan being universally praised for her willingness to speak up in the moment.
Speaking to Ryan Tubridy on Virgin Radio UK however, she addressed the whirlwind response to the episode, and said it ‘wasn’t something she expected’.
She said: “The reaction has been wild. It’s definitely not something that I had expected, and I didn’t necessarily set out to sort of make a splash.
“But I do think there’s something really telling about the society that we’re in right now and about how open women want to be with the men in their lives.”
“So many men and women that I know from all over the world have gotten in touch with me about this one comment, which is, again, I would urge people, please, please, please to watch this in context.”
Ronan went on to defend Redmayne and Mescal, saying: “Please watch the whole interview or watch at least that part of the conversation, because it really wasn’t about… the boys weren’t sort of like debunking anything that I was saying.
Ronan and Mescal on the show (BBC)
“But at the same time, it felt very similar to like when I am at dinner with a bunch of my friends and I will always make the point that, well, this is actually an experience that we go through every single day, 100%.”
Mescal and Ronan worked together in 2023’s Foe, with her effusive in her praise of Mescal, despite the incident.
“Paul being one of my very dear friends, I’ve had conversations like that with him before and he completely gets that and completely understands that but I think the fact that there was a moment like that that happened on a show like Graham Norton, which is something that the entire nation channels and to watch and even overseas, it’s something that people tune into, it seems to have had an accessibility which seems to have really gained traction, which I think is amazing.
‘It’s opening a conversation and again, hopefully it’s allowing more and more women to just be like, well, yeah, actually, let’s talk about our experience.”
