Saoirse Ronan: ‘I’ve seen people I love change because of addiction’

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Saoirse Ronan in The Outrun. Photo / Brock Media – Arcade Pictures / Collection ChristopheL via AFP
The actress says her role in The Outrun was cathartic. She and its author Amy Liptrot talk alcoholism, accents and wild swimming.

Saoirse Ronan is reeling off a list of the worries that run through her head while she is acting. “Does the audience like me? Do they accept me?
Do they think my performance is worthy of their time?”

She smiles and says she has become better at silencing these thoughts that have plagued her for the past 22 years, since she started acting aged eight in an Irish TV drama called The Clinic. Turning 30 has made her feel less anxious — as has her new husband, her fellow actor Jack Lowden. They got married in July near where he grew up in Edinburgh, and she refers to him as “comrade”.
“None of it ever goes away but that desperate hoping for approval used to be worse,” says the actress, who by 24 already had three Oscar nominations, for Atonement, Brooklyn and Lady Bird. “It helps that I’m more secure in my life personally. I completely trust and love the people around me and I feel strong enough to approach things that are painful.”
She seems happy and relaxed, in a long cornflower-blue dress, her ears stacked with gold hoop earrings and bleached blonde hair tied back from her delicate, freckled face. Arguably, she is being harsh on herself, having always taken on “painful” parts, from an assassin in Hanna in 2011 to Lady Macbeth at the Almeida Theatre in 2021.
It was Lowden who suggested she play her latest role, Rona, in an adaptation of Amy Liptrot’s 2016 memoir The Outrun. “He handed the book to me, and he said, ‘You have to play this.’”
It’s an intense performance. Rona (who is based on Liptrot) is an alcoholic twentysomething who flees her life in London and moves to Papay, a remote island of Orkney, to get sober. After being sacked from her job as a scientist and a devastating break-up, she finds work there with the RSPB, doing night shifts on patrol for the rare corncrake. There are flashbacks to how she self-destructed during her hedonistic life in London and the brutal way she treated the people who love her when she was drinking.
For Ronan, The Outrun had a personal significance. Alcoholism is “a world I know really well and I’ve been on the receiving end of the pain caused by it”, she says. “I’ve watched people I love change because of addiction. There’s a helplessness you feel when you watch someone you love — friends my age and one in particular who I’m close to — go through that. What will be etched in my brain for ever is that switch, when the glaze goes over someone’s eyes and they are gone. If you’ve become second best to alcohol you become resentful, so for this role I needed to put my own feeling towards it to one side. And I needed not to be angry about that any more.
“It was a topic that I wanted to explore at some stage in my life, to understand it better, to heal. I don’t think I would have been secure enough as a person to take something like that on even a few years ago.”
Liptrot, 43, says she may have held back if she had written The Outrun now. “In my forties I’d have been a bit more cautious but this book had a hunger and candour that comes from where I was then,” she says, speaking to me from Papay, where she’s living for six months with her two young sons and partner, researching a book about seaweed — a tangle of it hangs behind her in her rented cottage. “I was unemployed and lonely and reckless then; hungry to make something of my life.” The book became a bestseller, winning the Wainwright prize and launching Liptrot’s writing career.
She started drinking because “it was part of the culture to get really messed up on the weekend and in your twenties you can get away with that — but when I got older it became evident that my drinking wasn’t like other people’s”.
Ronan stresses how Liptrot is not what you might think of as a typical alcoholic. She was relatively comfortable growing up, with a promising career as a freelance journalist (although in the film she’s a scientist). “Yet there was this thing that overwhelmed every other aspect of her personality,” Ronan says. “Alcoholism is an illness which can affect anyone regardless of where they come from — and alcohol is everywhere, connected to every milestone in your life; Christmas isn’t Christmas unless you’ve drunk a bucket of wine.”
The Outrun has changed Ronan’s relationship with alcohol. “I’m more conscious of my intake — and there’s more people of my generation who are choosing not to drink any more because of how it makes them feel.”
While moving to a remote and wild place transformed Rona’s life, Ronan says that when she was growing up in the countryside, in Co Carlow, “the kids drank because they were bored so they would go into a field and have vodka or cider”.
She spent her childhood in a village — although soon was travelling the world for work, after she went to a casting call for the role of the precocious Briony in Atonement and got the role, aged 12. Her father was an actor, and her mother had worked as one too and encouraged her. It was her mother who told the 10-year-old Ronan to call a radio show and impersonate a character from Shrek to win a trip to Disneyland Florida. Her Gingerbread Man won her the competition.
Having started young, Ronan is “a realist about the industry … I never forget the fact that it’s a job, it’s not everything,” she says. “My mam instilled the need to have healthy separation between work and friends.”
She goes on to make a broader point about changing attitudes towards work. “Our generation finds it tough knowing your worth but still working hard. The danger sometimes is that absolutely you should have self-respect but you still have to show up on time, do your job, have a good work ethic, be respectful to the people around you, and I’m finding that that can be a difficulty for some people right now.”
She says her friend Tom Holland, also a child actor and now a Hollywood superstar, has it right. “He has an incredible work ethic. Why? Because he played Billy Elliot on stage aged nine. That kid had to work and I was exactly the same.”
When she started, she would do anything to avoid playing Irish parts but that’s changed. “The more you start accepting yourself the more you want to sound like yourself,” she says. “I didn’t want to be Irish because it used to be if you’re Irish, you’re playing a maid — just like how if you’ve got a working-class English accent, you’re never going to play the Queen. Actors with accents get pigeonholed quite a bit. You have to have the clout to say I will do this part sounding how I sound, so do you still want me?” She is also desperate to play a Bond villain “because there’s so much fun to be had playing a psychopath”.
She and Lowden live in London and she says that, given that she hasn’t moved to Hollywood yet, she isn’t about to. She’s about to appear in Steve McQueen’s film about the Blitz and is shadowing a teacher in Bristol to play one in a forthcoming movie called Bad Apples (she speaks about how understaffed state schools are and compares teaching to “like being a great director but even harder because you have to make kids learn”).
Lowden was a producer on The Outrun and she speaks highly of him as a colleague. “Jack Lowden and I were trying to keep an eye on the representation of Rona, how nothing else matters to her except alcohol but also remembering that she is human, so anyone can see themselves in her.” (She often calls her husband by his full name.) “If you find people that you love and you trust creatively, why would you not want to keep working with them? We have very high expectations for one another — when I tried out Rona’s Orcadian accent on him for The Outrun, he said, ‘You’re not doing that, are you?’”
The Outrun is also a nature book. Papay and Orkney are beautiful but also savage and isolated, with vicious winds, cliffs, waves and only the odd straggly-fleeced sheep for company. At the latest census the population was 90 residents. Rona’s father has sheep and the actress delivered seven lambs while filming, which she says was “terrifying because I didn’t know if I was going to kill the lamb”.
“There is a not-so-scenic side of Orkney,” says Liptrot, who has a corncrake badge on her jumper. “The grey town, the weather. It can seem a bleak and uncompromising place to live, particularly when you don’t really want to be there.” Some of the islanders are in the film and Liptrot says that, while young people often leave Orkney for university or jobs, they frequently return.
Ronan and Liptrot became close while filming, along with the rest of the mostly female crew. They would skinny-dip in the sea together and share their life stories. But both insist they are very much not leaping on the cold water swimming trend bandwagon. Ronan says: “I’ve always made all of my friends jump into the freezing cold ocean in January so the bit where Rona is uneasy swimming for the first time is probably the most acting I do in the whole movie.”
Liptrot has a cameo in the film and the people in the rehab group are actually alcoholics in recovery. Why does Liptrot think her story has had such appeal? “It is about turning your life around,” she says. “That’s an attractive narrative, especially as it’s not the truth for the majority of addicts. The possibility of change is a key message.”
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Written by: Susannah Butter
© The Times of London
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