By now you know Little Women is coming. And not just any Little Women, but a Little Women written and directed by Greta Gerwig and starring Saoirse Ronan and Timothée Chalamet, making it a full-fledged Lady Bird reunion. In a cover story for Entertainment Weekly, Ronan and Chalamet pulled back the curtain on the prep they did for their roles as the feisty Jo and heartsick Laurie, respectively. Ronan, it would seem, is the ultimate Jo, at one point completely disregarding etiquette lessons that were set up for the cast by Gerwig during the rehearsal process.

“Jo’s ethos is ‘Everything everyone else is doing, I’m going to do the opposite,’” she said. So she brought that energy to the etiquette lessons, completely ignoring the instructor’s guidelines like, “Don’t shake hands! Don’t gesticulate with your arms!”

“[I had] to try things that I’d never tried before,” Ronan said. “Be a bit messier with a performance.” The opportunity transformed her, she said: “I felt like I had tapped into something I’d never gotten the opportunity to tap into before, or I just didn’t have the guts to tap into myself. Finding that was just amazing.”

In the interview Ronan also said that she firmly told Gerwig that she only wanted to be in Little Women if she could play Jo, the writer and second-oldest March sister who, ever willing to buck tradition, rejects a marriage proposal from Laurie.

“When Louisa [May Alcott, the author] describes Jo, it felt like someone describing me physically: sort of gangly and stubborn and very straightforward, and went for what she wanted,” Ronan recalled of her first time reading the book.

Gerwig was tapped to write the script for the adaptation in 2016, later scoring the job of director as well after Lady Bird, her Oscar-nominated dramedy starring Ronan as a bullish Sacramento teen (and Chalamet as Kyle, her insouciant crush), hit theaters and fared well. “Greta had a very specific, energized, kind of punk rock, Shakespearean take on this story,” producer Amy Pascal said. “She came in and had a meeting with all of us and said, ‘I know this has been done before, but nobody can do it but me.’”

While on the circuit promoting Lady Bird, Ronan just asked Gerwig for the part of Jo. Chalamet, for what it‘s worth, said Gerwig asked him, “Hey, want to do another movie?” And he said: “Yes. Yes, please.”

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