Saoirse Ronan says the industry pit her against Dakota Fanning for years

Saoirse Ronan is in a class of her own—few other actors her age have received the level of critical acclaim (let alone four Oscar nominations). But Hollywood is still Hollywood, and working in the business since she was a pre-teen slotted her into a particular type—”precocious blonde child star,” as it were. And that meant she was being pitted against other precocious blonde child stars, or, as she puts it in a new interview with Elle, “For a while, it was me and Dakota Fanning.”

Ronan would actually “love for Dakota and I to work together,” she says: “She’s one of the reasons why I got into acting in the first place, because when I was really young, she was working from such an early age, and I used to watch her stuff….So to feel like, ‘Oh, there’s space for all of us now,’ where there’s still healthy competition, I think it’s great.” (The person she’s being compared to most now, apparently, is Chappell Roan. When the pair met, Roan “was like, ‘Oh, people tell me that we look alike,'” Ronan recalls. “And I was like, ‘Honestly, whatever you want, Chappell. Yes, we can look alike. That’s fine.'”)

It’s a good thing that some aspects of Hollywood have changed for the better (although if you ask Sydney Sweeney, the “pitting women against each other” thing hasn’t really ended). But in some ways, it’s changed for the worse. If even Saorise freakin’ Ronan has “been in audition rooms where I haven’t gotten a role because I didn’t have enough Twitter followers or whatever,” we are definitely in trouble. But Ronan has observed some positive evolution in show biz. “I think the strike had a massive effect on how we view the industry. That, paired with people knowing their worth a little bit more, or feeling like there’s an environment now where they can band together, and they don’t need to be against one another,” she says. “I’m seeing from the inside how over the younger generation are [when it comes to] some older studio execs and producers and directors who are just narcissists and control freaks. And we don’t want to work in that way anymore.”