Actress Saoirse Ronan ready to ‘crack open’ the psychology of alcohol addiction in The Outrun

NEW YORK – “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 in the US.

The American-Irish actress playing her, Saoirse Ronan, had already lived through enough for several lives at that point.

Then 23, she had been acting since she was nine and had garnered two Oscar nominations: Best Supporting Actress for Atonement (2007) and Best Actress for Brooklyn (2015).

Lady Bird, American actress Greta Gerwig’s debut as a solo director, would earn Ronan a third. Another followed for her role as Jo March in Gerwig’s Little Women (2019).

In 2024, Oscar buzz surrounds Ronan once again, thanks to her leading roles in Nora Fingscheidt’s The Outrun, which opens exclusively at The Projector on Oct 17; and Steve McQueen’s Blitz, which premieres on Apple TV+ on Nov 22.

Ronan’s career reads as a series of evolutions, pushing into new territory with every role. Over the years, she has 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 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.

“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-racked stretch of land where farmland gives way to the sea.

It is 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.

Here, nature has the power to heal, not by curing Rona of her own wildness but by inspiring her to accept it. Moviegoers 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 make-up of our culture in Ireland and the UK, 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”.

Fingscheidt co-wrote the screenplay with Amy Liptrot, author of the 2015 addiction-recovery memoir on which the movie is based.

Early in The Outrun’s development, the pair met 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 not only 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, the author said it was never intended as a direct portrayal.

“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.”

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 Ronan and his wife Monica were living in New York as immigrants without permanent legal status when their daughter was born. Monica worked as a cleaner, and Paul worked as a bartender and builder while auditioning for acting gigs.

The family returned to Dublin when Saoirse was three, then moved to Carlow, Ireland’s second-smallest county, and Paul was cast in the Irish soap operas Ballykissangel and Fair City.

Saoirse 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, an adaptation of the Ian McEwan novel of the same name – a role that earned her nominations for a Bafta, Golden Globe and Oscar.

Although she was just 13 at the time, Ronan held her own in the movie next to Keira Knightley and James McAvoy. She shone amid an ensemble cast in Wes Anderson’s Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), and in Brooklyn, her first leading adult role.

More recently, Ronan’s collaborations with Gerwig showcased the same charm that helped her 2017 appearance hosting sketch comedy series Saturday Night Live go viral.

The star – who is married to 34-year-old Scottish actor Jack Lowden – remains 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,” she said. “We’re not embarrassed when it comes to emotion and feeling and storytelling. We thrive on that.” NYTIMES