It might seem like the world is obsessed with Timothée Chalamet right about now (Dune, anyone??), and between his tousled mane of excellence and increasingly prestigious projects, can you blame them? As it turns out, regular old fans aren’t the only ones in awe of the Oscar nominee either: Saoirse Ronan is too.Ronan appeared virtually for an In Conversation With… TIFF panel on September 13, and while she and moderator Anne T. Donahue covered everything from early roles and pets to humidity-affected hairstyles and Greta Gerwig, it seemed only natural that Donahue ask the actor about her experiences working with Chalamet twice. Specifically, the moderator wanted to know when Ronan knew Timmy would make as good of a friend as an artistic collaborator, considering those two things don’t always go hand-in-hand.“I always knew he was very special. And he was very magnetic as an actor,” Ronan, who worked with Chalamet on Lady Bird and on Little Women, replied. “We’re very different in the way we work and the kind of performances that we give, and that really excites me—how different we both are.”

 

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Ronan recalled only getting to do a few scenes with the actor in that first film, but she said that it was during Little Women that she really got to dig in with him since they had some very full and lengthy scenes together. “He’s someone who I want to continue to work with because I’m just quite interested to see how it goes,” she continued. “Like as we get older and stuff, and when we have more and more experience, what it’s like when we come back together.”

Another major presence

Chalamet wasn’t the only notable Hollywood personality Ronan opened up about working with during the conversation. She also dished on director Greta Gerwig—the very filmmaker who brought them together for both Lady Bird and Little Women. For Ronan, it was Lady Bird that was particularly scary though, since that character was partially based on Gerwig herself.“I was very conscious of the fact that like, Greta is such a presence,” Ronan revealed. “Such a sort of individual as a personality that I couldn't just kind of carbon copy who she was or what she’d done in other films. Lady Bird was a combination of Greta and I and an alter ego,” she continued. “I remember even Beanie [Feldstein] and I were doing one of the performances in the film, and the real-life version of her, who she's based on, came to set. And I remember she turned to me and she was like, ‘God, it’s actually quite intimidating, having the real-life person here.’ And I was like, ‘Yeah. I know. Tell me about it,’” She laughed.[video_embed id='2031618']RELATED: The stars making their directorial debuts at TIFF [/video_embed]“But I mean, you know, the really special thing about that, for Greta and I, is that it was kind of our first entry into that type of film and that world," Saoirse explained. "It was her first time directing and my first time doing a film in a genre that’s my favourite genre. And, it was incredibly scary because of that, but we kind of did it for the first time together. So that was nice.”

Bringing it back to Brooklyn

Of course you can’t have a chat with Saoirse Ronan and not ask her about another one of her major, Oscar-nominated films, aka Brooklyn. The 2015 story of an Irish immigrant in the 1950s who lands in Brooklyn and pursues a relationship with a local was one of the biggest films on the circuit that year, and it landed Ronan one of her four Oscar nominations. (Not too shabby for a 26-year-old, right?)Perhaps part of the reason the film is so fantastic is because Saoirse herself had a lot riding on her performance. As someone with Irish roots herself (she was born in Brooklyn but her parents moved back to Ireland when she was three years old), the pressure to do right by her heritage onscreen was monstrous.“It was an Irish film, and it meant so much to so many people... I just [knew] I had to get it right. I was terrified. I had never felt aware of the camera in a negative way or felt like it had sort of paralyzed me but I was feeling that a bit on Brooklyn,” she added. “But it ended up being such a special film for me to do… it is a form of what so many Irish immigrants went through, what my mom and dad went through in their own way, and it was an honour to be able to tell that story.”And who better to tell that story than Ronan? Striking out on her own at the very same stage of life as her character Eilis, Saoirse felt like she was coming of age along with her. “With Brooklyn I was like 20, so the hormones were pinging all over the place anyway. And it’s a very intense time for anyone because it’s usually when they leave home to move away or get a job or go to college or whatever,” she said, revealing she had moved to London when she was 19. “I did Brooklyn in the middle of that transition and we went back to where I grew up, and I hadn’t been there in years. So that really represents such an important and very much older past time in my life that I will always feel really connected to. What made it very overwhelming was that it was a severe meeting of two worlds—very much my home life… and this new stage in my career,” she said.Catch Ronan alongside Kate Winslet in her next big-screen story Ammonite, an official TIFF selection. The Toronto International Film Festival runs from September 10 to September 19.[video_embed id='-1']BEFORE YOU GO: Horse rolls in the sand alongside doggy friends [/video_embed]