Awards season kicked off in full swing for Irish-American actress Saoirse Ronan. The Lady Bird star took home the Golden Globe for Best Actress over the weekend and phoned in to On Air With Ryan Seacrest to celebrate her big win on Wednesday, January 10.
While Saoirse beating fellow noms Judi Dench (Victoria and Abdul), Helen Mirren (The Leisure Seeker), Margot Robbie (I, Tonya) and Emma Stone (Battle of the Sexes) was headline-making enough, her adorable acceptance speech and shoutout to her mom couldn’t have been cuter.
"My mom's on FaceTime over there on someone's phone," she gushed while onstage. "So, hi! I have no time at all to say thank you but I just want to say how inspirational it is to be in this room tonight."
The 23-year-old, who was born in The Bronx before moving back to Ireland at the age of 3, told Ryan on-air that it was a lovely man named Barry who helped her mother watch in realtime.
“My mom was on FaceTime the whole time. There’s a friend of ours who we met when we were doing press for Brooklyn and his name is Barry and him and my mom are mates now and he had a phone signal in the room — I couldn’t get a phone signal on my phone — and so he said that he would call her up if I wanted,” Saoirse explained. “[My mom] was so sweet. She was like ‘Win, lose or draw, I just wanna be in the room with you no matter what.’ So she got on FaceTime and I could just see him in the corner with the phone pointed to the stage.”
The actress added that her adorable mom was across the globe in Ireland at the time and had to try to stay up.
“It was like half til in the morning and she was exhausted,” Saoirse said. “I’m sure she was emotionally drained because she was up so late and she was drinking so much tea just to stay awake so by the time she saw me she was like, ‘I’m so proud — and I’m so tired!’”
Listen to the full interview above to hear more from Saoirse, including how she mastered a California accent in Lady Bird.
Catch Lady Bird in theaters now.