Saoirse Ronan has spoken out after leaving her male Hollywood colleagues stunned with her brutally honest response to their joke.
As previously reported, the 30-year-old actress appeared on The Graham Norton Show alongside fellow stars Eddie Redmayne, Paul Mescal, and Denzel Washington.
Watch the moment below:The segment began with Redmayne revealing that he learned self-defense from a specialist combat expert for his role as an assassin in his new series, The Day of the Jackal.
After the 42-year-old Academy Award winner shared that he was taught how to use his mobile phone as a weapon to hit an attacker in the neck, Paul Mescal, who will star in Gladiator alongside Washington, joked that he would not think of pulling out his phone during an attack.
“Who is actually going to think about that? If someone actually attacked me, I’m not going to go ‘phone,’” the 28-year-old actor said, then gesturing as if to take a phone out of his pocket.
Ronan attempted to respond, but the audience's reaction made it hard for her to get the words out. Mescal then continued to quip: "Sorry Mom, one second - bang," while pretending to talk on an invisible phone. "That's a very good point," Redmayne chimed in afterward, as host Norton began to mime checking his pockets.
That's when the Little Women actress interjected, saying: “That’s what girls have to think about all the time." The actors were immediately stunned into silence, so she added: "Am I right ladies?" and was met with a round of applause.
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The Lady Bird actress reflected on the moment after she received praise for addressing the reality of women’s safety concerns on TV.
"The reaction has been wild. It’s definitely not something that I had expected, and I didn’t necessarily set out to sort of make a splash. But I do think there’s something really telling about the society that we’re in right now and about how open women want to be with the men in their lives," she said on The Ryan Tubridy Show, cited by Shropshire Star.
"So many men and women that I know from all over the world have gotten in touch with me about this one comment," she said, urging people to "watch this in context".
She contended that the male Hollywood stars '"weren't sort of like debunking anything that I was saying" and it's crucial to watch "the whole interview or at least that part of the conversation".
"But at the same time, it felt very similar to like when I am at dinner with a bunch of my friends and I will always make the point that, well, this is actually an experience that we go through every single day, 100 percent," she continued.
Ronan noted that Mescal is "one of [her] very dear friends" and she's had "conversations like that with him before and he completely gets that and completely understands that".
Overall, the Ladybird star is happy that "a moment like that that happened on a show like Graham Norton, which is something that the entire nation channels in to watch and even overseas, it’s something that people tune into, it seems to have had an accessibility which seems to have really gained traction, which I think is amazing".