“I’ve never been confident that I will have a career that will last for as long as I want it to last – even still,” says Saoirse Ronan, realistic as ever.
Ronan arrived to deafening fanfares with Joe Wright’s Atonement almost 20 years ago. An Oscar nomination followed, but many is the child star who failed to make the transition. Yet here we are (if she’ll forgive me) in the Summer of Saoirse: as we speak, in June, she has just celebrated her 30th birthday. She has two important features set for imminent release. And, though I don’t know this at the time, she is about to quietly marry Jack Lowden, her long-time partner and fellow actor.
Having bumped into Ronan a few times over the past two decades, I can attest that she seems reassuringly the same person. She was sober and professional as a kid, and that still appears to be the case. The thumbprints of the image handlers are nowhere visible.
“I’m 30 now, and I have had so many people this year being, like, ‘How do you feel? Like, you’re so old.’ Ha ha! And my response was always, ‘I was destined to be 30 my whole life,’” she says. “It feels so right for me to get older, because I’ve always felt like an old soul. The things I view as being fun have never been going out and getting wrecked. That’s been fun as well. I’ve definitely done that too. But I’ve been very careful about when and where I do that.”
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All of which is relevant to her searing performance in The Outrun, Nora Fingscheidt’s new film. Based on a fine memoir by Amy Liptrot, the film follows a recovering alcoholic, here renamed Rona, as, after a spell in rehab, she returns home to the wind-blasted Orkney Islands. We have rarely seen Ronan so raw.
“The source material was such a huge inspiration,” she says. “Because there’s so much about that topic that I relate to and that has affected me. We all have people in our lives who have suffered from some form of addiction, and I’m no different. That’s why I wanted to get involved in the project.”
She acknowledges that she and Liptrot are different people, but she makes sure to clarify that she is not just talking about substance issues.
“That is part of Amy’s past. That isn’t really a life that I indulged in quite as much. It wasn’t something that was a part of my early 20s as much as it was for others. But what I was referring to is her personality. She’s very quiet. She’s much shyer than I am. I’ve spent my whole life talking to people I don’t know.”
Sorry. Here she is with me on a rare sunny summer morning.
“No, no, no. You’re fine. It’s good!”
The Outrun is Ronan’s first feature as producer. She is not the only actor grabbing hold of the means of production. In an increasingly unfamiliar media environment, where streaming services are taking the place of studios, the temptation to claw back some control must be overwhelming. She and Lowden, who also takes a producer credit here, are now making their own rain, gaining a voice in their own futures.
“Jack and I have obviously been acting for a very long time,” she says. “I’ve been doing it for over 20 years now. We’ve worked with really fantastic creative heads along the way. But we’ve also worked in situations where we thought how beneficial it would be to the project if they had more creative minds at the top who have the experience we have.”
As this veteran actor talks us through her experiences, one has to constantly remind oneself that she has just said goodbye to her 20s. Few twice her age have achieved as much. She has worked with directors such as Peter Jackson, Peter Weir, Wes Anderson, Steve McQueen and, most fruitfully, Greta Gerwig. She has accrued four Oscar nominations (and the pundits are expecting at least one more next year). She has appeared in The Crucible on Broadway and in Macbeth in the West End. The New York Times rated her 10th in its list of the 21st century’s greatest actors. All that carried off without any scandal or tabloid hoopla.
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Ronan was born in New York City in 1994. Paul Ronan, her father, remains a busy actor. Monica, her mother, has been a responsible presence throughout the busy career. After moving home to Ireland with the family when she was three, Ronan was raised in Carlow and Dublin. She puts her realism about the business down to that upbringing.
“I think that comes from my mum having lived with a struggling actor – her husband at the time,” she says. “She experienced those highs and lows with Dad and knows how unpredictable this industry is and how it has nothing to do with whether you’re good or not – even whether you’re good-looking or not. There are plenty of gorgeous, really talented people out there who just haven’t had the luck. Or they haven’t had the right person give them the right job at the right time. Maybe they will when they’re 50. Maybe they will when they’re 20. It really is so specific to each person and to the time and the place that they’re existing in.”
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Ronan remained busy after Atonement. But it was, for a few years, unclear that she was going to register so strongly as an adult. She was excellent in Peter Jackson’s The Lovely Bones, but the film gathered indifferent reviews. She had a delightful smallish role in Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel, but she was one among many. It was her performance in Brooklyn, John Crowley’s screen version of the Colm Tóibín novel, from 2015, that allowed fans to believe Ronan really was here for the duration. A second Oscar nomination duly arrived. Even now, folk argue about whether her Eilis Lacey should have accepted the New York plumber or returned to the Wexford rugby lad.
“I was always very conscious of the transition from child actor to adult actor, or whatever you want to call it,” she says. “Purely because I’d seen it play out in public with certain people who I loved who went away when they got older. And also from working with people like Keira Knightley, who had made that transition. I’m pretty sure Sarah Bolger told me, years ago, how difficult it can be. All of the girls would say the same thing. When you get to 18 the industry doesn’t know what to do with you. You’re not a child any more. You can’t do that coming-of-age stuff. You’re also not quite a grown woman.”
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Two years after Brooklyn, the #MeToo explosion confirmed what only the most naive had failed to suspect: that abuse, of young women in particular, was rampant in the industry. Was she aware of those dangers?
“I wasn’t really, which I’m thankful for,” says Ronan. “I had my mother with me until I was 18, almost 19. She really protected me, but she also found a way to make me aware of the obstacles you could face along the way – and that there are people you’ll work with who could be perfectly lovely but who you can’t necessarily trust as you can family or friends. It’s a job. It’s work. It’s a business. I think she really prepared me for that. So when all of that started to come out, I wasn’t surprised. But it wasn’t something that I experienced.”
One can’t help but gawp at Ronan’s tirelessness during awards season. She does the silly games on late-night talkshows without baulking. She never rolls her eyes when they joke about finding her name hard to pronounce. It looks utterly natural, but it must require occasional intakes of calming breath. Then there is the pressure at home. Over those four Oscar campaigns it feels as if she has – I pause to put implied inverted commas round a hackneyed phrase – the “hopes of the nation resting on her shoulders”.
More power to her. She throws her head back and cackles at the grandness of the notion.
“I really do feel the support,” says Ronan. “I think I’ve been incredibly lucky that there’s been so much positivity around my ... ascent, as it were. As I’ve carried on doing this and it’s been going well, the country has been so warm to me and so supportive – and loving. Living away from home and seeing groups of actors from different countries, I actually don’t think there’s a group – maybe the Aussies – that are more supportive to one another.”
She has surely been an inspiration to younger Irish actors (and, given the age she started at, to a few significantly older than her). There were only a handful at the top when she made Atonement. Now we have Paul Mescal, Ruth Negga, Domhnall Gleeson, Barry Keoghan, Jessie Buckley. It is easy to become blase about that extraordinary shift. Cillian Murphy may be old enough to be her youngish dad, but his first Oscar nomination came two decades after hers.
“There’s such a kinship between all of us,” she says. “Which makes you feel less alone with it all, because it can feel quite isolating. There have been moments when I was doing the awards campaign – certainly around the time of Lady Bird – where I felt I was representing the country. As I’ve gotten older, I can kind of take it on the chin. It’s always felt positive. Though I don’t read anything.”
The Summer of Saoirse continues into autumn. In late July she married Lowden – best known for running madly in Apple TV+’s celebrated Slow Horses – at a secret ceremony in Scotland. They live an apparently normal life in north London. (She also has homes in Dublin and west Cork.) A month or so after The Outrun lands we will see her as a mother searching for her son during the Luftwaffe’s attacks on London in Steve McQueen’s Blitz. Any film from the director of 12 Years a Slave and Hunger is an event.
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“I should have spoken to Steve before, because I don’t know what he’ll want me to say,” she says, laughing. “I can’t wait for everyone to see it. I saw it a few weeks ago for the first time, and it’s amazing. You’re just reminded how bloody fantastic he is as a film-maker and how smart he is. I don’t think people will be disappointed at all.”
And more press. More questions. More talking to strangers. I don’t know how she does it.
“You’re not a politician at the end of the day,” she says. “You’re a deeply emotional, insecure person. As we all are. But it’s so heightened when you’re an actor, because you’re, like, ‘Please love me!’”
The Outrun is in cinemas from Friday, September 27th
