Saoirse Ronan spoke to LGBTQ+ friends before filming Ammonite

Ronan and Kate Winslet play lovers in the upcoming period drama
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Megan C. Hills23 September 2020

Irish actor Saoirse Ronan has revealed she asked her LGBTQ+ friends for “advice” before playing Charlotte in Ammonite, a lesbian love story set in 1840s England. Ronan stars alongside Kate Winslet, who plays paleontologist Mary Anning, and the pair joined Variety for an interview alongside director Francis Lee.

Ronan explained that “hadn’t really done” a role like her Ammonite one before, with her new restrained role in stark contrast to her character Jo in Little Women.

She explained, “Any of the gay women that I had spoken to - and I think Kate did as well - before we started, we were asking them advice that we as mainly straight women wouldn’t know about.”

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“One thing that a lot of the gay friends of mine said was that it didn’t really feel like there were many movies that actually represented the lesbian experience and went into the intimacies of that - not just the sexual side of it, but the relationship as a whole,” she said, citing 2018’s Disobedience as an exception.

Ronan and Winslet play onscreen lovers in the film, in which Winslet’s character Mary is paid to keep Ronan’s Charlotte company by her husband. While both women initially clash, they eventually begin to fall in love under the shadow of restrictive 1840s society. Lee, who previously directed God’s Own Country, also penned the screenplay

Ronan added that from an acting perspective, it “really interested me to play someone that was much more restrained.”

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She said, “I had just come out of the experience of ‘Little Women,’ which is very sort of full of life, and very busy in every scene. And there were a lot of cast members in every scene that we would do, and lots of talking, and it was very sort of like kinetic.”

In comparison, she said Ammonite had a “very delicate progression” with Lee explaining they tried to shoot the film as chronologically as possible to help the actors develop their relationship. Ammonite is set to premiere in the UK on October 17 at the BFI London Film Festival.

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