Saoirse Ronan was planning to enjoy a semi-retirement in 2023 after shooting Foe and The Outrun in 2022. However, Steve McQueen’s film Blitz brought her back to the silver screen.
“I’d been away from home for months,” Ronan told Entertainment Weekly. “I said to my agent, ‘The only way I would do anything else after that is if, I don’t know, Steve McQueen was making a film.'”
In Blitz, Saoirse plays mom to a biracial boy during the German attack on London in WWII. The film follows the duo’s attempts to be reunited after she sends her son away from London to protect him.
Before Blitz, McQueen filmed the Mangrove, which co-starred the Hanna star’s husband Jack Lowden.
“I’m such a huge fan of his, and I’ve always wanted to work with Steve,” Ronan shared. “When my husband worked with Steve, he would come home and say how impressive he found him and that working environment. So I said that that was the only way I was ever going to do it, sort of come out of semi-retirement.”
When her agent sent her a script for the McQueen film, she reached out to the filmmaker to ask for the lead role.
“I got her call to say that she was interested in the role,” McQueen revealed. “I was extremely flattered and very surprised because you never know — and how did she get the script anyway? But she’s got a good agent, a very good agent. I was very excited.”
The Little Women star and the Hunger director saw eye-to-eye from their first phone call.
“I’m pretty sure you called me geezer, which I loved,” Saoirse Ronan told McQueen. “When you were hanging up, you were like, ‘Alright, geezer, I’ll talk to you later.’ And I was with Jack, and I was like, ‘Steve McQueen’s just called me a geezer. Couldn’t be happier.’ That was the beginning of our working relationship.”
