Paul Mescal has addressed Saoirse Ronan’s viral remark on The Graham Norton Show, in which she silenced her fellow guests with a brutally honest reminder about women’s safety.
The Gladiator II star, 28, recently appeared on Irish broadcaster RTE’s The Late Late Show, where he was asked if he was surprised by the viral response to Ronan’s comments. “I’m not surprised that the message received as much attention that it got, because it’s massively important,” Mescal replied.
“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,” he continued.
“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. Like, that’s a conversation that we should absolutely be having on a daily basis,” the Normal People actor said.
Back in October, Mescal and Ronan – along with actors Eddie Redmayne and Denzel Washington – all appeared on the BBC chat show, where Redmayne discussed learning self-defense for his new series, The Day of the Jackal.
When the Les Misérables star recalled being taught how to use his cell phone as a weapon to jab an attacker in the neck, Mescal then joked that he would not think of pulling out his phone during an attack.
“Who is actually going to think about that? If someone actually attacked me, I’m not going to go ‘phone,’” said the actor, gesturing as if to take a phone out of his pocket.
“That’s what girls have to think about all the time,” Ronan then chimed in, as both Redmayne and Mescal fell silent.
After a brief pause, Ronan was met with a round of applause from the audience when she added: “Am I right ladies?”
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The Little Women star has since called the reaction to her Graham Norton Show comments “wild,” telling The Ryan Tubridy Show on Virgin Radio UK: “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,” the Oscar nominee said.
Ronan revealed that “so many men and women that I know from all over the world” have reached out to her in response to her Graham Norton Show comment, which she urged fans to “please to watch this in context.”
“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,” she continued. “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 per cent.”
The Lady Bird actor admitted that Mescal is one of her “very dear friends” and that she has “had conversations like that with him before and he completely gets that.”
“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 in 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,” Ronan added.
“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.”