Saoirse Ronan Doesn’t ‘Feel Safe’ Going to Movie Theaters in America: ‘I’m Not Sure if Someone Is Going to Pull a Gun Out’

"It’s horrifying," the Irish actress said of the lack of gun control in the U.S.

Saoirse Ronan is a supporter of independent film, but the actress says she now feels the need to weigh her enjoyment of cinema against concerns over her physical safety.

The Irish four-time Oscar-nominated actress said during Variety’s “Awards Circuit” podcast said that she finds American cinemas “horrifying” due to a lack of gun control. Past shootings at theaters have taken place during screenings of “The Dark Knight Rises” (2012) and “Trainwreck” (2015). There was a public threat of a mass shooting with the release of “Joker” in 2019 but no attack took place.

“I don’t feel safe going to the cinema because I’m not sure if someone’s going to pull a gun out. It’s horrifying,” Ronan said. “There are people I’m close to who don’t feel safe and can’t go to New York anymore because they’re just randomly getting attacked in the street for TikTok content.”

The “Outrun” and “Blitz” star added of the upcoming U.S. presidential election, “America is such a huge part of how the world operates. If you guys go down, a large majority of us will go down. Please don’t be on the fence. The people who are undecided will sway this election one way or the other.”

Ronan was born in the U.S. and later moved to Ireland to age three. Ronan had her breakout role at 12 years old with “Atonement,” which landed her her first Oscar nomination.

“I chose to do ‘Atonement’ over this big-budget action film that I’d gotten at the same time,” Ronan recently told IndieWire’s Kate Erbland. “Even then, when I was a kid, I was like, ‘This is going to have longevity in a way that that movie may not.’ I always wanted to be involved in as many projects as possible that would last. That didn’t mean that they had to be, or it doesn’t mean that they have to be ‘high-brow’ necessarily, but just I needed to connect them and I needed to feel like they were worth it.”

Ronan continued, “I’ve also kind of got one eye on the fact that I have done a lot of independent pictures, which I love, but I don’t just want to be pigeonholed as ‘the indie girl.’ I want to do big stuff as well. The older I get and the richer my personal life is, the more consideration I have to put into saying yes to a job. I’m very, very lucky that I’m in the position where I can afford to say yes or no to a job, and I’m very aware of that. But it has to be something that I think is worth my energy. I think the older I’m getting, the more experienced I am, the more I want to be pushed, the more I want to be stretched as an actor. That’s always been there, but I feel like the more of a skillset you have, the more you want to be tested.”