Editor’s note: This interview was originally published on September 5, 2025 at the Toronto International Film Festival. Republic Pictures will release the film in U.S. and UK theaters on Friday, September 18.
For star Saoirse Ronan, the appeal of a project like director Jonatan Etzler’s English-language debut “Bad Apples” is easy to see, harder to parse. “There’s kind of nothing out there like it,” the actress told IndieWire in advance of the film’s world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival this week.
In her first interview for the film, Ronan wasn’t putting it on: There really isn’t much like “Bad Apples,” and that’s a compliment. Consider two things: the film’s short synopsis (“A primary school teacher [is] forced to take drastic action because of a foul-mouthed, violent student”), which doesn’t sound exactly funny, and one of the main inspirations for Etzler casting the four-time Oscar nominee in a film that is, indeed, very funny.
It was her work on “Saturday Night Live,” which she hosted in 2017. When I mentioned to Etzler that Ronan’s turn in the film was so amusing and such a good show of her underutilized comedic chops that it sent me straight back to clips from her episode, the reserved Swede smiled.
“Actually, that was what I was doing as well,” Etzler told IndieWire. “I, of course, watched all the great films that she’s done, but then I saw this ‘SNL’ skit where she was a flight attendant. I just saw Maria there, because she’s this person of authority, but she’s also really funny doing this character. That ‘SNL’ skit was part of the reason why she was my top choice. I’m really happy that people are going to see her great comedic talent.”
The film, based on Rasmus Andersson’s 2020 debut novel “De Oönskade,” is a pitch black comedy that laces together both tough-talking real-world problems and a zippy sense of the absurd. Ronan’s character, Maria, is a beleaguered primary school teacher whose life is tough enough without the relentless onslaught of bad behavior by young Danny (Eddie Waller, in his debut role). Danny doesn’t just bother Maria, he also upends the rest of her mostly well-behaved class, and when Maria (mostly accidentally) finds occasion to lock Danny in her basement, she goes for it. And life? Oh, it gets better (and funnier and weirder).
“I’d never read anything quite like that, I’d never gotten the chance to play a character that would allow me to find myself in such insane situations, and it was still so hilariously funny,” Ronan said. “I responded to the material, which [screenwriter] Jess [O’Kane] so brilliantly adapted, because that’s my sense of humor as well. It was sort of a marriage between her brilliant, dark comic writing, my taste in comedy anyway, and then Jonatan’s style as a filmmaker. The three things really seemed to go hand in hand.”
While Both Etzler and Andersson are Swedish, setting the film in England and casting Ronan, an American-born Irish woman, made for an easy fit.
“There’s a lot of similarities between our cultures,” Etzler said. “Comedy is also a great way to deal with these quite complex issues that this film is dealing with. And I think there’s something very funny about Britain, being a culture where they’re very suspicious of people who can’t really fit into the system. They’re also really clinging onto their past quite a lot, [back at] the times of being a great empire. But I think they are also very happy laughing at it themselves, which is evident in their tradition of dark comedy.”
Andersson’s book struck another chord with Etzler: he previously worked as a teacher, and “the loss of control that you can get” with the profession popped off the page. When producer Oskar Pimlott came on board, Etzler was considering writing the script himself, but the team was intrigued by the possibility of getting a British voice in there. Eventually, they found O’Kane who had, serendipitously enough, also worked as a teacher.
“I could tell pretty quickly that this was going to be somewhat zany and off in its style and trajectory,” Ronan said of the film’s script. “I was hoping it was going to have an unorthodox ending and weirdly, without spoiling anything, it kind of is, because your palette has become used to the bizarre and the zany for an hour and a half. Everything is so unexpected with this film. … I feel like when you put yourself in the uncomfortable, it feels more realistic, and it is kind of closer to home than a lot of what we’re spoon-fed a lot of the time in Hollywood and in the film industry in general.”
Even before Ronan officially signed on, Pimlott said, signs were good that she was into what they were offering. “I remember, after her agent read the script, she sent us a message that was just like, ‘Wow, absolutely loved it, can’t wait to send it to Saoirse,’ and that was already like, ‘Oh, that’s great. This is the first actor we’ve approached,’” Pimlott said. “There were so many reasons why she was at the top of our list, but I think one of them was that we hadn’t seen her do this character before, a kind of good-person-doing-bad-things [role]. You can’t help but empathize with Saoirse Ronan, there’s not a single person out there that doesn’t like her.”
When she signed on in October 2023, it was clear Etzler and team had found a leading lady who wasn’t just excited about the material, but one who truly understood it.
“She got it immediately,” the director said. “She was our top choice, and she got on board quite early, which was great. She was really excited about doing this crazy project. She was a champion for the film very early on. She has such a comedic talent that we don’t see too much of, but I think she [also] finds moments where she can be very human and a little bit weird. And she’s obviously one of the greatest actors of our generation.”
Crucially, Ronan understood the need to make Maria’s choices — which, yes, include locking up one of her young students in her basement — somehow believable to the audience. You have to vibe with what’s happening, insane as it is, or none of this works.
“We worked really hard on that, just making it as believable as possible, those steps that lead to her locking him in the basement,” Etzler said. “One of the most important things was making the very core of the film very believable so that we really follow Saoirse’s character all along and we understand everything that she’s doing. When you have that, you can start surrounding it with increasingly more absurd layers. … And if we can sort of follow her there, then when she’s locked him in the basement, we’re going to look at ourselves and be like, ‘Oh, what am I sympathizing with now?’”
It’s a nutty combination of the absurd and deep empathy, which Ronan was eager to dig into. “You can see how anyone, even though this is a comedy, anyone could find themselves in that situation,” Ronan said. “You’d all like to believe that you wouldn’t, but when you’re pushed to it, of course you can just take it that little bit farther. And that’s what I love about it. We are all a lot more awkward and dark and twisted and funny and caring and all of these contradictory things. We have the world of Instagram, where we present a certain side of ourselves that isn’t necessarily the whole truth. And then we have this which, if you’re ready for it, is really going to sort of shine a light on that other world. If you let it, it’s incredibly satisfying.”
For Ronan, who has spent the last two decades making consistently compelling career choices — like last year’s double whammy of wartime drama “Blitz” and addiction story “The Outrun” — that really appealed.
“I was very up for that,” Ronan said. “The more dark it got, the better. One time, when myself and the crew were all sort of feeling like, ‘Jesus, this is super raw,’ is that bit in the beginning when Maria and Danny kind of have their first altercation, and it looks like it’s going to go to a place that’s incredibly dark. Whenever you’re having to do physical scenes like that, there’s only so much you can actually pretend, because you’re physically still having to execute it. That felt quite close to the bone, but in a great way.”
When Ronan and I last spoke in 2024, it was to chat about “The Outrun,” which she and husband Jack Lowden also produced. Despite the dark nature of the film, Lowden emphasized how much he’s always admired something special about Ronan’s process: “It’s evident quite quickly with Saoirse is how comfortable she finds it. It’s not something that she struggles with, it’s something that she does things that most people can’t do, but she makes it look like it’s just making toast. How easy she made it look has still never left me.”
When I mentioned that to Ronan, and asked how that feels to her in practice, the answer came appropriately easily. “I wish more people would revel in that actually, because I do think that the work we do can have a huge effect on people, but it’s also not the be-all and end-all,” Ronan said. “It’s incredibly important and fulfilling for all those involved and anyone it’s shared with. It’s built on pure expression and feeling and, in order for me to be able to feel free enough to do that, I need to be having fun. That’s not to say that every day I’m on set, I’m a laugh a minute, but I enjoy what I do. I also need breaks from what I do.”
Ronan is clear-eyed when it comes to the price of those kinds of choices and that kind of energy. She loves acting now, has loved it all her life, and she’d like to keep it that way.
“I’ve been doing it now for over 20 years, and there’s a fork in the road in my life, where I need to protect my relationship with [my work so] that it doesn’t get stale,” Ronan said. “I know, for me to do my best work, it’s really important for me to stay loose and almost childlike. I think if you spoke to most child actors that are still working, a lot of them probably have the same approach toward the work. There’s a purity to it, and there’s weirdly a simplicity to it that I don’t believe you should shy away from just because you’re older. … I do this for myself. I don’t do it for anyone else. I do it because I really enjoy it, so I’ll always want to protect that relationship that I have with it. And as soon as it starts to not feel that way, then that’s when I need to do something else.”
Speaking of a childlike approach: “Bad Apples” includes a winning supporting cast of youngsters to keep Ronan on her toes, including the astonishing Waller, standout Nia Brown, and the charismatic Mylee Soverall. Casting the kids alongside Ronan was daunting. “Probably number one on the list of ‘This is probably going to be the biggest challenge of the project,’” Pimlott said with a smile. They turned to iconic casting director Fiona Weir, whose resume speaks to her canny ability to cast kiddos (the “Harry Potter” and “Fantastic Beasts” films, most obviously).
“We found really brilliant kids for the whole classroom, it’s a real kind of mix of kids from different backgrounds, although a lot were fairly local,” Pimlott said. “I remember when we sort of threw Jonatan, Saoirse, and the cinematographer into the room for the first rehearsal with the kids, and they did come out after, a bit eyes wide, looking a bit bedraggled like, ‘Oh, my God, how are we going to do this?’”
No kidding. “I remember the very first day that I had in the classroom, I was terrified,” Ronan said. “They’re at that age where they’re not cute little five-year-olds, they’re not babies, and they’re also not teenagers where you can kind of put on the bravado. They’re right in the middle, where they’re going to be super honest with you. They don’t care who you are. They probably haven’t seen any of your films, so you can’t even fall back on that. So I was just meeting them sort of human to human. I’m more comfortable with probably kids than anyone else, apart from maybe dogs.”
For Etzler, the biggest casting challenge was a more specific one: finding Danny. “The biggest challenge was Danny,” Etzler said. “I think we had 2,000 children auditioning for that part. We were approaching the shoot and I found this boy, Eddie Waller, in the north of England, and he was just perfect. We needed a quite specific kid, who has this sort of anger underneath his skin and we can sort of believe that he’s sort of uncontrollable. That was just hard to find that specific quality.”
The kids made Ronan “up her game,” she said. So well-behaved! So excited! It’s easy to see why that would jibe with Ronan’s feelings about her work.
“A lot of them had never done it before, or maybe they’d been part of a drama group for a couple of years, but they were very fresh, they were very green,” Ronan said. “So it was very much up to me to sort of adapt to them. As an actor, it was a great exercise. I feel like, the more you do this, you can get jaded, you can get tired, you can get a bit lazy, you can fall into bad habits. And these kids were so well-behaved, they were all about hard work. Fiona found a group of people who are so ready to work, so diligent, really kind and respectful and funny and brought their own personality to it. It was just a joy to work with them.”
When the film premiered in Toronto in 2025, it arrived with plenty of buzz and more than a few questions (“she locks the kid in the basement?” Yes, yes, but she treats him relatively well, all things considered). What was not a concern: that people would laugh, and see Ronan’s skills in an entirely new way.
“I hope people are going to be laughing, but I also think they’re going to be sometimes laughing because they’re uncomfortable, because laughter can be a reaction to discomfort,” Etzler said before the film’s premiere. “I think they’re also going to be looking at themselves and sort of asking, ‘In what way am I complicit in the suffering of others?’ The film is about how we deal with people who can’t fit into society and who can’t fit into these sort of square boxes that we have in our society. I think people are going to be talking a lot afterwards.”
While Ronan was not be in attendance (the actress was pregnant with her and Lowden’s first child, and was understandably not traveling too far these days), she couldn’t wait to hear what audiences thought about it.
“I think it’s philosophical without it being too didactic,” Ronan said. “I think it’s shining light on the uglier side of human nature, while also still making us laugh. I always think the best way to get a message across to anyone is to make them laugh. I’ve always thought the hardest genre is comedy, and to get that right is no kind of mean feat. When somebody does execute that well, it should be celebrated. I think we are at this point where if we don’t laugh, we’ll cry, and ‘Bad Apples’ really taps into that sensibility right now that we’re all experiencing.”
Mostly, Ronan just loves what they made, her sense of humor taking center stage, tickling all sort of funny bones and poking at some serious sore spots. After all, she said it best. There isn’t much out there like it, or Ronan.
“Bad Apples” premiered at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival.
