Saoirse Ronan is being praised for leaving her male colleagues speechless with a powerful reminder about gender-based violence.

The Little Women actress sat down for an interview on The Graham Norton Show last Friday (October 25) with Paul Mescal, Eddie Redmayne, and Denzel Washington.

At one point, Eddie discussed playing a professional assassin in the thriller series The Day of the Jackal.

The Oscar winner revealed that training for the role involved learning self-defense from a specialist combat expert, and one of the tricks he was taught was to use his phone as a weapon to hit an attacker in the neck.

Saoirse Ronan had a fierce comeback to her male colleagues’ joke during an interview on The Graham Norton Show

Image credits: Taylor Hill/FilmMagic

“Who is actually going to think about that? If someone actually attacked me, I’m not going to go ‘phone,'” Paul quipped, gesturing as if to take a phone out of his pocket.

Saoirse tried to speak up, but her colleagues continued to joke, with host Graham miming that he was checking his phone in his pocket. 

“Sorry, Mom, one second – bang,” Paul continued.

“That’s a very good point,” Eddie conceded. 

Image credits: The Graham Norton Show

While the audience laughed, the Lady Bird actress interjected, “That’s what girls have to think about all the time.”

After a moment of silence, Saoirse added, addressing the audience, “Am I right ladies?” Her comments were met with a round of applause.

The clip quickly made the rounds on social media, with thousands of female users thanking Saoirse for addressing the safety concerns women face on the street.

“This encapsulates men being ignorant of male privilege in a nutshell. The fact that these guys– nice guys, mind– are just so unaware is almost terrifying. Thank goodness for Saoirse, though because we all need a bit more attention drawn to this,” reads one message posted on X (formerly known as Twitter), liked over 63,000 times.

During the show, Eddie Redmayne and Paul Mescal joked about the idea of using their phones as a weapon to defend themselves from an attacker, which Eddie was taught for a role

Image credits: The Graham Norton Show

Image credits: The Graham Norton Show

“I like this clip bc these two are arguably some of the least toxically masculine actors, who have shown real intention to make space for female voices in their careers, and yet they are men, so they will never live in a woman’s skin and truly understand the violence we live with,” a separate user wrote.

“The definitive shift after she said that is palpable, actually making them think instead of letting it run as some silly thing with the audience,” a third person pointed out.

“Saoirse Ronan is a queen. Men need a reminder of what it’s like being a woman so they can appreciate their privilege. The silence after she said that speaks volumes,” somebody else agreed.

In the United States, 85% of men reported feeling safe while walking alone at night, compared to 64% of women, according to the Gallup World Poll.

When asked whether they ever “avoided or changed doing things they wanted to do to protect themselves from violence,” more than 70% of women responded affirmatively, according to a study published by the NIH. Over 20% reported carrying pepper spray, and nearly 20% carried a noisemaker, such as a personal alarm, for protection.

The Lady Bird actress left the men speechless by reminding them that women have to think about self-defense and deal with safety concerns daily

Image credits: The Graham Norton Show

Image credits: The Graham Norton Show

The 30-year-old actress is promoting her new film, Steve McQueen’s Blitz, where she plays Rita, a distraught single mother searching for her missing son during the German air raids on London amidst the Second World War. 

The film is scheduled to be released in select cinemas in the United Kingdom and the United States on November 1. Then, it will be available on Apple TV+ on November 22.

“To be able to show this other side of what was happening in the war and how it affected mixed-race couples and mixed-race children—and children in general and women—was so fascinating,” Saoirse explained.

“I was so relieved when Steve told me that it was going to focus on a mother-son relationship, and that he’d follow the people back at home and the people on the ground who had been overlooked and weren’t really written about in history books as much. And what an interesting perspective.”

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Saoirse is set to star next in Jonathan Etzler’s Bad Apples, a comedy thriller about a primary school teacher struggling with an unruly student. The film, which also stars Jacob Anderson, is based on Rasmus Andersson’s debut novel De Oönskade.

Saoirse was applauded for interrupting the men to give them and the viewers a powerful reminder

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