“I think actors are sponges,” Saoirse Ronan said. “You’re able to open yourself up to everything around you.”
Credit...Celeste Sloman for The New York Times

Saoirse Ronan Has Lived, and Acted, Through a Lot

by · NY Times

“I wish I could live through something,” says the teenage title character in the 2017 movie “Lady Bird,” yearning for a life beyond suburban Sacramento.

The actor playing her, Saoirse Ronan, had, at that point, already lived through enough for several lives. Then 23, she’d been acting since she was 9, and had already garnered two Oscar nominations. “Lady Bird,” Greta Gerwig’s debut as a solo director, would earn Ronan a third. Another followed, in 2019, for her role as Jo March in Gerwig’s “Little Women.”

This year, Oscars buzz surrounds Ronan once again, thanks to her leading roles in Nora Fingscheidt’s “The Outrun,” which opens in theaters Friday, and Steve McQueen’s “Blitz,” out Nov. 1st.

Ronan’s career reads as a series of evolutions, pushing into new territory with every role — over the years, she has also played a 1950s Irish immigrant in New York, a child assassin, a vampire, Lady Macbeth and Mary, Queen of Scots. Now 30, with over two decades of experience in front of the camera, the Irish actress has committed herself in “The Outrun” to a character containing multitudes: a woman raised in a remote island community, who returns to recover from her addiction to alcohol.

In “The Outrun,” Ronan’s character, Rona, returns home to the Orkney Islands in Scotland to recover from her alcohol addiction.
Credit...Martin Scott Powell/Sony Pictures Classics

“It was so much more than just making a film for me,” Ronan said, in a video interview from New York. She described an experience that was both physically and emotionally demanding: “I think actors are sponges, you’re able to open yourself up to everything around you.” For “The Outrun,” that meant swimming in the icy sea, delivering lambs on-camera and going deep into the psyche of a woman in crisis.

The movie unfolds on Orkney, an island off Scotland’s northern coast, and the “outrun” is a wind-wracked stretch of land where farmland gives way to the sea. It’s a terrain of extreme beauty, of sandstone cliffs and open sky, sea-green and cerulean, matched by the blue hair of Ronan’s character Rona, who returns home to the island to recover from her addiction.

Here, nature has the power to heal, not by curing Rona of her own wildness but by inspiring her to accept it. We watch as Rona walks slowly into the cold waves, is visited by a colony of bobbing seals, and spends her nights listening for the call of the corncrake, a rare bird that nests on the island.

Her recovery is spliced with scenes from her former life in London — first ecstatic, then catastrophic — where drinking destroyed her relationship and her career as a scientist. Ronan said that exploring the psychology of alcohol addiction was her “main motivation” in taking on this role. “It’s in the makeup of our culture in Ireland and the U.K., and I have been affected by it in the way that so many other people have,” she said. “It unfortunately — but maybe also fortunately — shaped me and influenced me a lot growing up.”

Speaking carefully to avoid identifying the person in question, Ronan spoke about her experience watching an alcoholic up close. “I repressed a lot of the feelings I had towards it,” she said, adding that she now felt ready “to really crack it open and explore the psychology of an addict.”

The director Fingscheidt’s first film, “System Crasher,” follows a 9-year-old girl whose violent outbursts send her on an odyssey through the foster system. Rona in “The Outrun” is a kind of spiritual successor: a woman capable of wonder as well as emotional extremes. “It’s the full spectrum, from absolute euphoria, to love, to devastation, and depression, and shame,” Fingscheidt said. “She goes through almost every possible human shade of emotion.”

Fingscheidt co-wrote the screenplay with Amy Liptrot, the author of the 2015 addiction-recovery memoir that the movie is based on. Early in the movie’s development, Fingscheidt and Liptrot met with Ronan, and the three decided to rename the protagonist “Rona” instead of “Amy,” after another Scottish island that is uninhabited and a lot more remote. “We picked ‘Rona’, because it’s an island beyond the outrun,” Fingscheidt said, “but also there’s a similarity to ‘Ronan.’”

Several of the movie’s scenes were shot on the farm where Liptrot grew up, and though Ronan’s character was drawn from her memoir, it was never intended as a direct portrayal, Liptrot said. “She has that brittleness that I had in early sobriety,” Liptrot said, “and then towards the end, she channels the ambition of my writing — that sort of manic, grandiose quality.”

When shooting wrapped in the wilds of Orkney, Ronan headed south to London, to shoot “Blitz.” In that movie, she plays Rita, a mother searching for her missing 9-year-old son as the city is bombed by the Nazis during World War II.

Rita embodies a woman both challenged and liberated by the absence of men, who have left for the front lines. With her hair tied in a scarf, like Rosie the Riveter, and her legs marked with eyeliner, to look like she’s wearing seamed stockings, we see Rita singing, dancing, working in a munitions factory and agitating with other working-class Londoners for the opening of bomb shelters.

“In that time, women were the backbone of the country, emotionally and physically,” McQueen said in a recent interview. “I wanted to give that character — a sort of unsung hero — a platform.” McQueen said he admired Ronan’s ability to move between registers. “It’s a very intimate film, but at the same time the scale is epic,” he said. “She has the ability to hold those two fields, in a way not a lot of actresses can.”

McQueen was also impressed by Ronan’s singing, which was key to the role. In one uncertain, then triumphant, scene, we watch Rita perform a song on BBC radio from the factory where she works. McQueen remembered shooting the scene in Liverpool: “There were 450 women,” he said. “Usually men dominate a set, but the energy was completely different. Saoirse sang to them, and there was this infectious sense of emotion.”

Rita also sings with her son, George, played by Elliott Heffernan, and her father, Gerald, played by the musician Paul Weller, both of whom were acting for the first time. “It was like a family unit,” McQueen said. “With Saoirse, she was not only protective of Elliott, but she understood him, because of course she started to act when she was nine herself.”

Clips of Ronan’s earliest on-camera performances are still available on YouTube: In 2003, she appeared in “The Clinic,” a medical drama made by Ireland’s public broadcaster, as an earnest child who narrowly escapes getting run over by a car. Behind the wheel on-set was her father, Paul, also an actor.

Paul and his wife Monica were living in New York as undocumented immigrants when Ronan was born. Her mother worked as a cleaner, and Paul worked as a bartender and a builder while auditioning for acting gigs. The family returned to Dublin when Ronan was three, then moved to Carlow, Ireland’s second-smallest county, and Paul was cast in the Irish soap operas “Ballykissangel” and “Fair City.”

Ronan grew up visiting her father on film sets, and made rapid progress once she started landing her own roles. Not long after “The Clinic,” she was cast as Briony in “Atonement,” a 2007 adaptation of the Ian McEwan novel, a role that earned her nominations for a BAFTA, a Golden Globe and an Oscar.

Although she was just 13 at the time, Ronan held her own next to Keira Knightley and James McAvoy in the movie. She shone amid an ensemble cast in Wes Anderson’s Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), and in “Brooklyn” (2015), her first leading adult role. More recently, Ronan’s collaborations with Gerwig, in “Lady Bird” and “Little Women,” showcased the same charm that helped her 2017 appearance hosting “Saturday Night Live” go viral.

That monologue, which included a song about how to pronounce “Saoirse” (it’s SAYR-sha), was as much a conversation about Irishness as it was a joke about the nation’s love of names with superfluous vowels. It also spoke to Ronan’s other role as a cultural ambassador and part of a wave of young Irish actors that includes Paul Mescal, Barry Keoghan and Jessie Buckley, currently making a global impact.

McQueen — who has previously given prominent roles in his movies to Irish actors, including Liam Neeson, Colin Farrell and Michael Fassbender — praised an outlook that all three, and Ronan, have in common. “It’s an island,” he said of Ireland. “No one can get too big for their boots. I also think that when you come from an island, there’s a real want there to communicate, and tell stories, and to find the emotion.”

Ronan, who recently bought a house in West Cork, said she remained attached to her home country, even as she moves far beyond it. “What I’m most grateful for about Ireland is the fact that we celebrate the arts as much as we do,” said Ronan, adding: “We’re not embarrassed when it comes to emotion, and feeling, and storytelling. We thrive on that.”

Explore More in TV and Movies

Not sure what to watch next? We can help.