Celebrating her new movie Mary Queen of Scots this week at the Monkey Bar, the actress Saoirse Ronan, now 24, said she’s has wanted to play the role of this ill-fated queen since she was 18. “Mary is a big deal where I come from, an icon,” she noted, and though many notable actresses have played her, there was enough new in the source material, a copiously researched book by Tudor scholar John Guy, to warrant another look. Director Josie Rourke was attracted to the period material through the book, which reads like a “forensic thriller”—“I’m just a nerd,” she joked. That, and Ronan’s enthusiasm: “My path to this film was through Saoirse.”

At 18 there were few roles for Saoirse. A child star, she found that the juicy roles for girls dried up once they reached a certain age. Mary was misrepresented in England: she was either a femme fatale or a stubborn child, in each case a product of fake news. Rourke, best known for her work as artistic director at London’s Donmar Warehouse theatre, said the movie’s allure is its timeliness: it is about leadership, doubt, and betrayal, the vivid and vicious cost of power, and the lack of empathy, the sisterhood between Mary and Elizabeth (Margot Robbie) thwarted by the violence of power. The two queens meet just once in the film, in a heavily choreographed encounter involving a maze of silky sheaths. At that point in shooting, Saoirse did not know Margot, did not know what she would wear or how she’d look. In fact, Margot as Elizabeth was white-faced, the better to hide her pox-scarred visage.

It is no spoiler alert to say that Mary dies at the end, head chopped, a martyr. To some degree this fate was by her design, and staged at the movie’s start and end. Mary Stuart is one of Ronan’s most accomplished performances. She arrived at the Monkey Bar, just having wrapped on Little Women, Greta Gerwig’s new film after last year’s Lady Bird in which, of course, she starred. Mary Queen of Scots is Josie Rourke’s directorial debut in film; Rourke was pleased to say, she was guided and protected by her two accomplished women stars.

Regina Weinreich

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