While promoting Hanna at WonderCon last month, I took the opportunity to ask Saorise Ronan about The Hobbit. Rumored for a part in The Hobbit since January, Ronan said that she was not officially attached to the project yet. Turns out that it won't be working out.

Ronan recently spoke with the Belfast Telegraph (via The One Ring) and said that things likely won't work out so that she can star in Peter Jackson's two part epic. "It’s probably not going to work out with The Hobbit unfortunately," said Ronan, "Because I would have been working for about a year on it and there were other projects that I was very interested in." The young actress was rumored to play Itaril, a young elf, in the films, though her comments during WonderCon seemed to suggest that she would have played an original character.

While the word "probably" in the first half of Ronan's quotes made it sound as though there was still some chance, the use of past tense in the second half makes it sound like her decision is definitive. So where do we go from here? Is Peter Jackson going to recast the role? What role was she actually going to play? Perhaps we'll just have to wait until the second episode of Peter Jackson's video blog.