Saoirse Ronan worried she sounded like a "robot" in ‘Lady Bird’.
The Irish actress is known for her ability to master different accents but while she struggled with the American tones of the titular character in the drama, she found the dialect of her eponymous character in historical drama ‘Mary Queen of Scots’ far easier to master.
She told Britain’s Harper’s Bazaar magazine: "[The accent] is how I get into the character. What can be more difficult than the actual sounds is the cadence and melody.
"Modern American is much flatter than my natural voice. I found that quite a challenge on Lady Bird. Greta [Gerwig, the director] kept having to say, ‘Make it a bit flatter!’ And I’d think I sounded like a robot.
"With the Scottish, I’m basically speaking the same way. The rhythm and music are the same. That made it much easier to keep Mary human, for me."
The 24-year-old actress has always wanted to play "well-rounded" characters and has never been interested in minor supporting roles to male characters.
She said: "From a purely selfish point of view, I’ve always wanted to play characters who are well-rounded and interesting and smart, or who are intelligently written.
"And because that’s what I’ve always wanted to get out of it, the films end up reflecting that. They’re the only roles I want to play. Even when I was a kid, I knew I didn’t just want to play ‘the sister’, or ‘the girlfriend’, or ‘the secretary’.
"That was always a priority for me, to play someone who -even if they were only in a few scenes – really had something to them."
Saoirse Ronan’s ‘robot’ voice
