Ella Ruddle unpacks a recent viral clip from The Graham Norton Show in which Saoirse Ronan left Paul Mescal, Eddie Redmayne, and Denzel Washington at a loss for words. Drawing attention to how even Hollywood's ‘nice guys’ are unconscious of women's experiences.
Last week, on the widely popular Graham Norton Show, Saoirse Ronan left fellow actors Paul Mescal, Eddie Redmayne, and Denzel Washington speechless. A clip from the show, which has a large and diverse audience, has since gone viral across social media, with Ronan speaking out about gender-based violence.
During the show, Redmayne mentions that when training as a lone assassin in The Day of the Jackal, he was taught to use a phone in self-defence in an attack. In response, Mescal jokingly says, “Who is actually going to think about that, though? If someone attacks me, I’m not gonna go…phone,” miming reaching into his pocket. Everyone gets in on the joke, including Norton, as Ronan smiles along.
“That’s what girls have to think about all the time. Am I right, ladies?"
Their laughter was extinguished when Ronan said, “That’s what girls have to think about all the time. Am I right, ladies?" Their smiles were wiped off their faces, and the actors didn’t know quite what to say because what they were laughing at, for many women, isn’t a particularly laughing matter.
The clip has gone viral as the men in this episode are considered ‘the nice guys of Hollywood.’ We see in real-time that even the ‘nice ones’ are so far removed from the experiences of women. They didn’t grow up receiving talks in high school about how to get home safely. They weren’t offered ‘self-defence’ classes as extracurriculars. The first thought when they get home usually isn’t to text their friends they are ‘home safe.’ And I am sure they have never pretended to be on a phone call on their way home in the dark.
Online media company Junkee commented, “The way Saoirse effortlessly shows how these men…are still men at the end of the day and don't realise the real-life fears women have daily.” Men get to joke about fending off an attacker “because they won't have to worry about these things happening to them in the same way women do.”
In an interview with Ryan Tubridy on Virgin UK Radio, Ronan responded to the video’s virality. She said, “I didn't necessarily set out to make a splash but I do think there is something really telling about the society we are in right now…” Whether she intended to or not, Ronan gave these men the simplest of reality checks.
These men didn’t intend to be malicious or harmful; it was clearly a comedic moment, yet their lack of awareness was so blatant.
In this interview, she urged listeners to watch the whole Graham Norton episode for context because “the boys weren’t really debunking anything I was saying.” She stresses that she and Mescal “have had conversations like that…before, and he completely gets that and understands that.” But I think that is the crux of it all. These men didn’t intend to be malicious or harmful; it was clearly a comedic moment, yet their lack of awareness was so blatant.
As Hannah Fergusson from Cheek Media says, men are “still so unaware when speaking about violence…and their lack of conscious thought of what could happen to them in these spaces is proof, yet again, that even lovely men do not understand or consider the experience of women.”
But I think the real buzzkill, and the wider issue Ronan hints at, is the continued threat of gender-based violence and the lack of education surrounding it.
Many have commented in response to the video that Ronan was a ‘buzzkill’, and that late-night TV is meant to be fun. But I think the real buzzkill, and the wider issue Ronan hints at, is the continued threat of gender-based violence and the lack of education surrounding it. Taoiseach Simon Harris earlier this year claimed we have an “epidemic of sexual and gender-based violence in Ireland.” The Irish Women’s Aid reported 40,048 disclosures of domestic abuse against women and children in 2023. In the same year, the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre received 18,605 calls to the national helpline.
Labour Party leader Ivana Bacik said to The Journal in July that “education is crucial to ensure boys and young men don’t regard women as objects in sexual terms.” This lesson is still clearly not coming across in our education system, so maybe Ronan’s comment could become more than a viral moment and serve as an education for men nationwide.
In the Virgin UK Radio interview, Ronan said that for a moment like this to happen on Graham Norton, a show “that the entire nation tunes in to watch…it really gained traction, which I think is amazing. It's opening a conversation…and allowing more and more women to be like, yeah, actually, let's talk about our experience.”
She goes on to say, “I met a woman last night who is working on Blitz and she said you know it's really interesting after watching that interview myself and a few of my female friends were with my husband and we said ‘oh you know this really reminds me of the fake phone call’ and her husband went, ‘what?’ ”
They will start to realise how so many of our nights are taken up, wondering how we will make it out and back safely.
When the systems in place are failing so many, these conversations sparked by pop culture or viral media moments give men and boys an insight into the women’s experience. They will start to realise how so many of our nights are taken up, wondering how we will make it out and back safely. How many of our nights end with an expensive taxi fare that could have been a walk. How we map our routes to avoid certain areas, even if it means adding time to our journey. Not all pop culture needs to be turned into societal discourse, but when Ronan caught these four men out in the clip, their silence said it all.
Ronan was right when she said, “Of course, you wouldn’t understand, you have never had to go through anything like that.” The difference is Redmayne was taught self-defence to play a character in a movie, whereas women are taught self-defence for real-life safety concerns. We have gone through our entire lives pooling these sorts of survival tactics, and thanks to Ronan’s remark, this is a burden we can share with the men in our lives.