- Saoirse Ronan brought the set of a chat show to silence last month
- The actor discussed women’s safety while sitting on an all-male lineup
- Now Paul Mescal – who was also on the show – has praised his friend for her comments
He’s the talk of Tinseltown – with his latest movie, Gladiator II, taking home $87 million globally on its opening weekend.
But Paul Mescal has still had time to praise his loved ones.
The actor, 28, broke his silence on an encounter he had with friend and fellow Irish actor Saoirse Ronan, 30, last month.
When appearing on The Graham Norton Show in the UK on October 25, Ronan brought the studio audience, host Norton and all male guest lineup – which included Mescal, Eddie Redmayne and Denzel Washington – to silence when she spoke about women’s safety.
As Redmayne explained he had been taught how to use a phone as a weapon while training for his role as an assassin in The Day of the Jackal, Mescal questioned whether anyone would realistically have time to take their phone out when being attacked – to which Ronan said, “That’s what girls have to think about all the time. Am I right ladies?”
Although her comments brought the room to a complete quiet, Ronan then received an enthusiastic response from the audience and her male colleagues.
And now, Mescal – who starred opposite Ronan in the 2023 movie, Foe – has called her words “spot on”.
In an interview on Irish broadcaster RTE’s The Late Late Show, the star – who shot to fame as Connell Waldron in the 2020 Hulu series, Normal People – said he was not surprised by the huge reaction on social media to her remarks, “because you’re like, as you said, you’re on a talk show like this, and you’re kind of just talking.
“But I’m not surprised that the message received as much attention that it got, because it’s massively important and I’m sure you’ve had Saoirse on the show. She’s – quite often, more often than not – the most intelligent person in the room.”
Mescal added, “But I think she was spot on, hit the nail on the head, and it’s also good that messages like that are kind of gaining traction. That’s a conversation that we should absolutely be having on a daily basis.”
‘The reaction was wild’
Ronan had already cleared up that there was no ill-feeling between her and the other men on the sofa.
In an interview with Virgin Radio UK, she said they “weren’t sort of debunking anything that I was saying”, and that Mescal “completely gets” the issue as they have talked about it before.
But Ronan added that the reaction to her words had been “wild” and “definitely not something that I had expected”.
“I 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,” the Blitz actor said.
Ronan also said that the conversation “felt very similar to 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%”, and that it was “amazing” that this moment is “opening a conversation” and “allowing more women to just be like, well, yeah, actually, let’s talk about our experience”.
