Jamie Hawkesworth captures Bronx-born, Ireland-bred Saoirse Ronan for Vogue US August 2018 cover story. Camilla Nickerson styles Saorise, coosing looks by Prada, Miu Miu, Calvin Klein 205W39NYC, Michael Kors, Erdem and more. / Hair by Damien Boissinot; makeup Dick Page

Sally Rooney interviews Ronan, first nominated for an Academy Award at age 13 for her role in 'Atonement', near her childhood home In Ireland, days before the national referendum that repealed its ban on abortion. The activist had actually made a video encouraging a vote to legalize abortion, a step she took with no regrets.

“I just felt like that wasn’t important,” she says (about concerns for a backlash against her). “I know people who had to travel abroad in order to get an abortion, and that’s when I knew I would speak out.” But Ronan doesn’t engage only with policy concerns that touch her life directly. She also voiced her support in 2016 for the illegal takeover of an empty building in Dublin’s city center to accommodate the homeless; and she takes the time to recommend me Jeff Chang’s We Gon’ Be Alright, a book of essays on racial resegregation in the U.S. “I wouldn’t say I grew up politically minded,” she tells me, “but the older I get, the more in touch I am with what activists are doing—and the more I want to help them.”

Ronan will play Mary, Queen of Scots, in Josie Rourke’s biopic of the sixteenth-century monarch, out this December. Her foil is Margot Robbie, who plays Elizabeth I in 'Mary Queen of Scots', who describes Saoirse as "beyond her years". Read the entire interview.