Saoirse Ronan: how the actress went viral

Denzel Washington, Paul Mescal, Saoirse Ronan and Eddie Redmayne sitting on couch during filming for the Graham Norton Show — (L-R) Denzel Washington, Paul Mescal, Saoirse Ronan and Eddie Redmayne during the show (Image credit: Alamy / PA Images)

Celebrity chat shows are a pretty tedious spectacle these days, said Finn McRedmond in The Irish Times. But occasionally something enlivens these contrived occasions by breaking through the "forced anecdotes and PR gambits". It happened the other day on Graham Norton's BBC show.

Eddie Redmayne was on and caused much hilarity among his fellow actors on the sofa by describing how, in preparation for his latest role in a new adaptation of "The Day of the Jackal", he'd been trained in self-defence, and shown how to use a mobile phone as a weapon. "Who is actually going to think about that?" asked Paul Mescal. "If someone attacked me," he joked, I wouldn't think about reaching for my phone. But the men's laughter gave way to an awkward silence when the actress Saoirse Ronan cut in, saying: "That's what girls have to think about all the time – am I right, ladies?"

The look on the other actors' faces after Ronan detonated this "chat-icide bomb" was priceless, said Marina Hyde in The Guardian, and footage of the moment was soon all over the internet. "When clips like this go viral, it's for a reason." Most, if not all, women will have experienced some version of the laddish banter on Graham Norton's show, and many will have regretted not finding quite the right words at the right time to make Ronan's point. But she did. Ronan nailed it, agreed Caroline Davies in the same paper. Her perfectly timed interjection highlighted the fact that "men, even the good guys, seem to have a blind spot when it comes to women's lived reality".

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Granted, it was "a good(ish) telly moment", said Camilla Long in The Sunday Times, and Ronan made a valid point. I was irked, though, by the righteous tone of the ensuing social-media pile-on. To some, women are "always poor, helpless victims, while men are dangerous, thoughtless aggressors" who must be punished and shamed. It's depressing, too, that this story got so much more attention than other recent, more important stories related to women, such as the fall in the birthrate in this country or the oppression of women in Afghanistan. "If you reduce feminism to petty anger and viral media clips, it won't be there to protect you when things really matter."