Photo by Parisa Taghizadeh - © 2021 20th Century Studios All Rights Reserved
Saoirse Ronan will be joining the cast of Blitz, Steve McQueen’s new film about WWII London that will be released by Apple Original Films. Her co-star, described as an “unknown newcomer”, has not yet been announced.
Filming on Blitz is scheduled to begin later this year.
Ronan, a 28-year-old Irish actress born in The Bronx, has garnered four Oscar nominations, for Little Women, Lady Bird, Brooklyn, and Atonement. More recently, she appeared in See How They Run and The French Dispatch, and worked under director Garth Davis on Foe, in which she appeared opposite Paul Mescal.
Ronan made her acting debut in 2003 on The Clinic, an Irish medical drama series. She made her film debut in 2007 in I Could Never Be Your Woman. Her stage credits include the role of Abigail Williams in the 2016 Broadway revival of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. She also appeared on the West End as Lady Macbeth in a 2021 revival of Shakespeare’s classic tragedy.
In 2020, The New York Times ranked her among the top ten actors of the twenty-first century.
Blitz will not be Ronan’s first appearance in a WWII-themed film. In 2010, for Peter Weir’s The Way Back, she played the supporting role of a Polish orphan who’d joined a group of convicts taking a 4000-mile trek to India after their escape from a Siberian prison. Nor will this be McQueen’s first attempt at depicting civilian life during WWII.
He’s also working on Occupied City, set in Amsterdam, a project by New Regency and A24.
McQueen will be writing, producing, and directing Blitz under the aegis of his Lammas Park entity, joined by Working Title Films and New Regency. He’d previously worked with New Regency on 12 Years a Slave (2013) and Widows (2018). 12 Years… won him an Oscar for Best Picture.
McQueen also directed an anthology series Small Axe, which depicted the lives of West Indian immigrants to London. He later codirected three documentaries for BBC and Amazon: Black Power: A British Story of Resistance, Subnormal: A British Scandal and Uprising.