Saoirse Ronan is sad about missing out on Harry Potter along with "half of Ireland"

Saoirse Ronan’s career is certainly nothing to scoff at, but if she had a time turner of her own she might have used it to go off in a slightly more magical direction. In a recent appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live, the The Outrun actor revealed that she not only auditioned for the part of Luna Lovegood in the Harry Potter movies, but is still pretty haunted by the fact that she didn’t get it in the end. 

When Kimmel asked if there were any parts Ronan particularly regretted turning down or missing out on, she responded, “The one that stayed with me over the years was—I didn’t say no to it, I just didn’t get the part…—but I had gone up for Luna Lovegood in Harry Potter years ago.” The actor went on to explain that “it was the Irish character, so they got everyone Irish in, like half of Ireland to come and audition.” (The other half of the country was presumably busy trying out for Seamus Finnigan.)

While Ronan was too young for the part in the end (she was only 13 when the Order Of The Phoenix, the first film featuring Luna, came out in 2007), she still “got to read out a scene that was going to be in Harry Potter, and it was the coolest thing ever.” 

Despite Ronan’s understandable, fandom-inspired sadness over missing out on that particular path, it’s probably a good thing an owl never brought her a letter in the mail. We don’t even need to consider the giant, J.K. Rowling-sized stain on the franchise that developed after Ronan’s audition (but thankfully hasn’t really spread to any of its actors). The same year Order Of The Phoenix was released, Ronan was busy starring as aspiring novelist Briony in Atonement, which earned her her first Best Supporting Actress nod at just 14 years old. Even if she had gotten Luna, she might have turned it down. “I chose to do Atonement over this big-budget action film that I’d gotten at the same time,” Ronan recently told IndieWire. “Even then, when I was a kid, I was like, ‘This is going to have longevity in a way that that movie may not’… [I]t doesn’t mean that they have to be ‘high-brow’ necessarily, but just I needed to connect them and I needed to feel like they were worth it.”

Besides, there’s a chance Ronan may soon get to star in a magical franchise of her own. When Kimmel asked whether the actor was involved in her frequent collaborator Greta Gerwig’s upcoming Chronicles Of Narnia series, she responded, “There isn’t, like, no truth to it.” Gerwig hasn’t asked her (or presumably anyone) yet because she’s still busy writing, but the two “have the type of relationship where I just sort of go to her and I say, ‘So I’ll be in this, just so you know,’ and she takes some time to think about it and then she goes, ‘okay.'” So we may still get a chance to see Ronan as some type of witch. Fingers crossed she’s at least considered for the White Witch (played in the original films by Tilda Swinton); it would be so fun to watch her go dark side.