Saoirse Ronan's first kiss was onscreen

Actress Saoirse Ronan's first kiss was filmed - she had to kiss her young co-star in her movie debut I Could Never Be Your Woman when she was 11 years old.

The Brooklyn star told chat show The Talk director Amy Heckerling did all she could to prepare the young actress for the scene, but she still found it nerve-wracking.

"It was stressful for an 11-year-old child who was definitely not ready to kiss a boy yet," the Irish star explained. "I remember it was my first film and I had been on set before..., but I never had to do anything like that. It was Amy Heckerling who directed it and she came up to me and she was like, 'OK, we're going to do it. You're going to sit on the bench and you do the scene and then you're going to kiss him'."

The young star was so freaked out, she started obsessing about how long the kiss should last.

"I was like, 'OK so let's just get specific here for a second, how long do you actually want me to kiss this boy for?'" she continued. "She (Heckerling) was like, 'I don't know, a few seconds'. I was like, 'No, no, no, how long do you want me to kiss him for?'

"So I asked her to specifically tell me how many seconds I had to kiss him for. It was 30 seconds, so for every take, once we would go in for the kiss, I'd just go in (and count while I was kissing) and that was it."