(Cover) - EN Showbiz - Saoirse Ronan felt nervous joining an all-male cast six weeks after they had started filming together.

The young Irish actress enters the plot later in the film, which details the epic journey of a group of prisoners who escaped from a Siberian gulag in the 1940s.

The 16-year-old star - who has also featured in Atonement and The Lovely Bones - admits she initially felt on edge working alongside stars like Colin Farrell, Ed Harris and Jim Sturgess in rough filming terrains in Bulgaria, Morocco and Australia.

However, the actress soon found that she had bonded with the older men.

It was something really that I never experienced before personally because Id always started a film with everyone else at the start of shooting and so I was a little bit nervous about it because I didnt know anyone as well as they had gotten to know each other, Saoirse told Cover Media. But luckily we have a really great group here and we all got on really well so it wasnt really any great trouble at all.

Irish star Colin revealed that far from feeling awkward about a newcomer to their group, the cast were actually relieved by the arrival of Saoirse.

The 34-year-old said that after that amount of time together, the crew needed a female to breathe new life into the set.

More than her being just Irish, it was nice to have female energy to join the gang six weeks, seven weeks in we were kind of sick of looking at each other by that stage it was a welcome relief to have Saoirse come absolutely, Colin explained.

The movie is based on Slawomir Rawicz's memoir The Long Walk. (C) Cover Media