In researching Alcott, Gerwig found a fascinating duality between the life she lived as a woman and the life she wrote for her fictional self, Jo.
#JO MARCH LITTLE WOMEN PROFESSIONAL#
Here, the stakes to be won are professional as well as personal. It’s an emotional moment of pride that diverges from the finish of Alcott’s novel (as well as the popular 1994 film adaptation starring Ryder) to focus not on love and marriage but on a woman who demands power in both art and commerce. As Jo, Ronan demands concessions and refuses to back down. Jo’s struggles mirror those of performers and creators such as Gerwig and Ronan in an era when there’s a tremendous push to achieve gender parity in the male-dominated entertainment and media space.Īt the end of the new film, Gerwig invents a twist that Ronan executes to a T - a tribute to Alcott’s trailblazing spirit in which she clashes with a stuffy and chauvinistic editor (played, ably, by Tracy Letts) over the publication of her book.
#JO MARCH LITTLE WOMEN MOVIE#
They have helped inform the history of feminism in this country - enabling a movie shot more than a century and a half after Alcott first set pen to paper to engage in timely conversations. Jo’s set of values, first introduced when the book was published in 1868, have echoed throughout the decades. It helps that many of the issues that Alcott grappled with have a present-day resonance. It’s a role that has been played by the likes of Katharine Hepburn and Winona Ryder, but Ronan is able to give the part contemporary zip. And yet in order to get a platform for her work she has no choice but to write pulpy short stories for newspapers under a male pen name. She wants to be treated with the same respect as men and to be afforded the same opportunities. Jo rejects the gender conventions of her time by refusing the pageantry of frilly dresses and debutante balls. Jo March is the lionhearted rebel at the center of Alcott’s most famous work, the story of four sisters coming of age in the Civil War era. Jo is such an important figure for so many girls, and I didn’t feel daunted by it. “I was ready to jump out of line and take it on. While Ronan admits she was “desperate” for the shot to play Jo, she says she was never more prepared to tackle a role. With Jo, there was an extraordinary softness to her. I always knew she would be great, but she was really concerned she wouldn’t be able to find the character. “I drove her around everywhere, because she had to go to doctors’ appointments and different things to get cleared to film. “Before we even started shooting, she was scared,” says Gerwig. Gerwig agrees that Ronan seemed different on the set of “Little Women” - more poised and assured than she was during their earlier collaboration. It also puts her in a cast of industry heavyweights including Meryl Streep and Laura Dern, as well as heat-seeking contemporaries such as Florence Pugh, Timothée Chalamet and Emma Watson. The Alcott adaptation reunites Ronan with her “Lady Bird” director, Greta Gerwig. It was a great experience, but I was constantly on the phone to my mom or my friends saying, ‘I can’t do it.’ It wasn’t like that with ‘Little Women.’” I’m going to mess it up.’ I really felt that. “Even with something like ‘Lady Bird,’ I was fully terrified every day. “It was a big step up for me as an actor,” she says. Though prone to a mushy brain, Ronan seems certain of one thing - Jo represents the most assured performance of her career. Her new insistence on downtime can be blamed on the breakneck pace she’s maintained, appearing in more than 10 films in the past five years - and that’s not counting a vocal turn on Adult Swim’s “Robot Chicken” and an Ed Sheeran video for “Galway Girl.” It’s an eclectic list of projects that have required her to be a shape-shifter, moving effortlessly from the shy Irish immigrant of “Brooklyn” to the Sacramento teenager with artistic ambitions in “Lady Bird” to the calculating monarch at the center of last year’s “Mary Queen of Scots.” In “Little Women,” Ronan delivers another compelling turn, portraying Jo March, an aspiring novelist who refuses to adhere to social conventions. There’s nary a Marvel film or action franchise under her belt, yet she remains one of the most visible and employable actors of her generation. Ronan’s work has almost exclusively existed in a world of small prestige dramas, gaining confidence and quality as she has grown up on movie sets around the world. Time off is an alien experience for the star, who is known to take big, unexpected risks on screen and has been hustling since age 12 to build the anomaly that is her résumé.