Speaking to the Variety Awards Circuit podcast, Ronan said she voted in the 2020 presidential election and she “will absolutely be voting for the right person in this election”, referring to the Democratic nominee and current vice president, Kamala Harris.
“I don’t feel safe here anymore. I go into a cinema here when I’m doing a Q&A to promote a movie that I’m in and I’m not sure if someone’s going to pull a gun out,” she said.
“It’s in your head. That’s an awful feeling. It’s an awful feeling for me to know that my best friends who have just started to have children aren’t feeling 100pc safe about sending their kids to school in case they get shot at five-years-old.
“There’s friends of mine who are thinking about buying bulletproof backpacks for their children to keep them safe. That’s barbaric and he [Donald Trump] has done this.”
Ronan, who was born in the Bronx in New York before she and her parents moved back to Ireland when she was three, said she could run for US president herself and joked “it seems like anyone else can so maybe I should”.
She warned against the potential impacts of Republican nominee and former president Donald Trump winning the election again, particularly for minority groups and the wider western world.
“From the perspective of someone who doesn’t live here, lives in the UK but is Irish, is part of the EU, America is such a huge part of how the world operates, how the western world operates, and if you guys go down, a large majority of us will go down with you.
“There’s that, the ripple effects of if he [Donald Trump] gets in again, I think what happened the first time around was that it opened the floodgates for people who have a very unhealthy mentality, an incredibly racist, bigoted view on people who aren’t them.
“The idea of the ‘other’ became so prominent and became so toxic, and we’re even seeing it now in Ireland which I never thought would be the case. It’s had such a domino effect on every other place around.”
The US used to be “progressive in a lot of ways” Ronan said, but that has taken a “backpedalling” in recent years, particularly in terms of reproductive rights and “minorities literally feeling they could be attacked at any point, they could be killed at any point, they are in serious danger”.
“There’s Asian American women that I work with who I’m really close to who feel like they can’t go to New York anymore which is a place they used to live in, they used to feel safe in, because they’re just randomly getting attacked in the street for f***ing TikTok, for content.”
She appealed to US voters not to “be on the fence” and said those who are undecided “will sway this election one way or the other”.
