“I think in lots of ways, she’s been waiting for the kind of role where she could really prove the scale of actress she is,” Brooklyn director John Crowley told us over the summer. Though Crowley praised the "intensity of her gaze" and "incredible emotional reserve" in her work, he also noted that offscreen, Ronan is an “extremely funny” woman obsessed with a certain blockbuster comedy. “Her biggest disappointment in me is that I never get the quotations from Bridesmaids that she throws my way,” he said. (By the by, the Kristen Wiig movie was reportedly the theme of Ronan’s 20th birthday party last year.)The actress' unguarded humor was on display when we sat down with her. After discussing our favorite types of doughnuts — "I like the little frosted dough-ball things," she said — we segued into a discussion of Brooklyn, Broadway, and more."It did feel that way, and I think that’s why I felt an awful lot of responsibility to get it right. I really wanted to do an Irish film, work with an Irish director on an Irish story — something that was authentic and really told a different story compared to the ones that we've heard about Ireland so far. I mean, so many people focused on, like, one part of history for a really long time. I'm fascinated with that story, but I wanted people to see what else we could do. We started in Ireland, and we shot in the town that’s 20 minutes away from where I grew up. It was like home and work all of the sudden colliding. That was quite overwhelming.""Never.""Only on Grand Budapest Hotel. Apart from that, I've never used my Irish accent in a film. Never. So, it was really important for me to find the right script to do. When I signed on, I was thinking about moving away [from Ireland], so I had said to John when I met him, 'Listen, I've been thinking about moving to London.' He lives there. I was tempted so much to do it, and I really needed to get out of Ireland at that time and kind of just look after myself, pay bills, and be a bit more anonymous, and just have more of a regular experience. In the time [between when] I had signed on to when I made the film, I had moved out and I had gone through what Eilis goes through. So, it was like I was just going through that journey, and I went through it with her as well.""When I had read the script, I thought, Great, this is a well-written script. It's a strong female role. It's Irish. John is gonna do it. It'll be great, you know? But then when we made [the film], so much had happened to me in that year personally that it took on this whole new meaning. Everything else that I've done pretty much had always — and I wanted it this way — been very, very different to me, to my situation, to my upbringing, to my character. I loved playing people that were just so completely different to who I was. I had done that so much that I was ready to then do something closer to home. The experience of reliving what I had just gone through on the screen was overwhelming. It was like somebody holding up a mirror an inch from your face, and you're not able to look away and you're like, Fuck. It's scary."