Saoirse Ronan on Bad Apples, bad teachers and her ambitions as a director

Having played three memorably difficult children earlier in her big-screen career, it was Saoirse Ronan’s turn to star as a put-upon teacher dealing with a little terror or two. Ronan’s breakthrough role in Atonement (2007) saw her young Briony Tallis see and say things she shouldn’t have, while in Hanna (2011) she trains as the eponymous young assassin. Come Lady Bird (2017), with her character on the cusp of adulthood, she leaps from a moving car after rowing with her mother. New comedy Bad Apples continues the unexpectedly challenging behaviour, but now it’s the children rather than the adults who are on the receiving end.

Ronan’s fraught, exasperated turn as primary-school educator Maria sees her punish a truculent, violent and conniving 10-year-old in her class named Danny (Eddie Waller) with an unexpectedly lengthy detention in a surprising venue. Most of the children Danny disrupts are average pupils – that is to say Maria may not give them a second thought. Unfortunately, class swot Pauline (Nia Brown) is not such a wallflower, even if her toadying manner initially suggests she’ll be nothing but helpful.

Swedish director Jonatan Etzler’s dark comedy, which he co-adapted with Jess O’Kane from Rasmus Lindgren’s novel De Oönskade (The Unwanted), owes much to the performances of Waller and Brown, who deliver a true and recognisable depiction of troubled youth. If you weren’t these kids, you knew them, and either way, you were probably taught by someone much like Maria.

Though much of her time is currently occupied by filming Sam Mendes’s four-feature project on The Beatles (Ronan plays Linda McCartney), we managed to grab a few minutes with her to chew over Bad Apples.

Lou Thomas: Despite the extreme lengths Maria goes to, she seems like a real teacher of a type we’ve all met. Did you meet any teachers and sit in any classrooms for research?

Saoirse Ronan: We shot the film in Bristol and went to this incredible primary school [Culverhay School in Bath] where we shot a lot of the film. We sat in on a few lessons, which made me weirdly quite nervous. I think because I haven’t been in a classroom in so long, it put me on edge. I was really nervous to go back into that environment, and I was right to be nervous, because teachers are under a lot of pressure to grab the kids’ attention at the top of a lesson, hold the room and actually deliver the lesson that you want to deliver in not a lot of time. It’s like a performance.

I got a lot from that experience. I spoke to a lot of friends who are teachers, and I was finally able to ask them more elaborate questions than just, “How’s work, is it all right?” I was able to really go, “You know the head teacher? What do you really think of her?” There’s also a podcast called The Secret Life of Teachers, which was invaluable, because teachers go on it and they’re anonymous. It’s warts and all – unfiltered conversations about what it’s like to be a teacher. I highly recommend it. It’s like proper gossip.

There have been many interesting teachers in film, from good ones in Donnie Darko [2001] to bad ones in things like The Breakfast Club [1985]. Did you did you watch any particular films in preparation?

Jonatan made a film before Bad Apples [One More Time, 2023] which was about a teacher’s experience, and it was still a comedy but was quite a bit darker. I watched that, and that gave me a good sense of what kind of a filmmaker he was and also what that experience is like.

I can’t remember if I watched it at the time – I’ve been thinking about it a lot, knowing that I’m going to be doing press – but things like Motherland feel in this world. It feels very honest about the experience of parenthood and teachers and what kids are actually like, so all of that sort of stuff really helped.

Do you sympathise with Maria’s actions?

I don’t condone her actions, which is important to say, but I totally can see how she gets there. I sympathise with the woman who’s just trying to do her best, but she’s not been handed a great card in life. Every life event has been tested and disrupted, and she’s someone who thought her life was going to go in one direction and it really didn’t. The bitterness, resentment and shame that can set in when that happens to a person, makes you really feel for them, because she really is just trying to do her best. I think myself and the crew were all incredibly morally conflicted throughout, because we can see how she got there. I’m not saying I would lock a kid in a basement. But it’s a grey area, and I think it’s going to be an uncomfortable place for audiences to be in.

Did your experience playing Briony in Atonement have any bearing on how you felt about the child characters in the film? 


Probably how I viewed Pauline, yeah. Because both of those characters are incredibly intelligent and switched on and therefore super-manipulative and a bit of an evil genius. I think Briony, weirdly, wasn’t as evil as Pauline is – [as] fully aware of what she’s doing and the repercussions of her actions. Atonement and Bad Apples are so similar [laughs]. One event can easily have a domino effect and give way for another bad thing to happen.

You’ve made a short called Paper Plane, which recently premiered at Venice. Why was that film the right piece for you to make your debut behind the camera?

There’s elements of it that are rooted in truth and experiences – in a more imaginative way – that I had as a child. It was something that I wrote, and I think more than anything it needed to be a love letter to my mother and to a younger version of myself, which at its heart is what it is. I’ve wanted to direct for a really, really long time; even from before I started to act, I seemed to be really drawn towards directing. It was just a case of when, and it felt like things were starting to change in my life, and work needed to reflect that.

Do you have any ambitions to make a feature? 


I have ideas. I’ll let this have its life and then see what I want to do. But yeah, I would like to do a feature.

Bad Apples is in cinemas from 18 September and at BFI Southbank from 25 September.