Saoirse Ronan at a screening of The Outrun on Sept. 18, in London.Vianney Le Caer/The Associated Press
The outrun is a literal thing, a field left wild on the edge of a farm. In the Orkneys, the wild, 70-island archipelago off the northern tip of Scotland (about 20 of which are inhabited), it often ends at a cliff face. So the outrun is also a metaphorical thing, the actor Saoirse Ronan said during a video chat this week: “A place where your truer self is able to run free, but with an element of danger to it – you’re dancing on a precipice.”
This year has been a kind of precipice for Ronan. In April, she turned 30; in July, she married the actor Jack Lowden (Slow Horses), whom she met making Mary Queen of Scots (2018). The preternatural talent she showed at age 12 in Atonement has only deepened. And by choosing her films and directors carefully – from Hanna, Brooklyn and Lady Bird to Little Women and the coming Blitz, due in November; from Joe Wright and Greta Gerwig to Wes Anderson and Steve McQueen – she weathered the metamorphosis from teenager to adult that often fells young actors. Now Ronan has become a producer, too, with the new drama The Outrun, based on the prizewinning 2016 memoir by Amy Liptrot.
In the memoir, Liptrot returns to Orkney, her childhood home, newly sober after 10 years in London, where partying had spiralled into alcoholism. She weaves together her past – including moments with her bipolar, schizophrenic father and her evangelical Christian mother – with scientific facts about fauna, wind speed and geology, and also with local myths about selkies (seals who take human form on land) and the stoor worm, a monster from whose teeth the Orkneys were made.
During the COVID-19 lockdown, Ronan and Lowden read The Outrun and immediately saw its potential for a film. “Jack’s got a terrible habit of starting a book and not finishing it, so he’ll have like six on the go,” she says. “But The Outrun he read in two days, then handed it to me.” They decided to co-produce it, collaborating in every step of the process. Its director, Nora Fingscheidt (System Crasher), co-wrote the script with Liptrot.
“The memoir presents this universal addiction story in a way that is so specific,” Ronan says. “What Jack and I spoke about the most was how unusual it is to follow a young woman from a middle-class background as she’s in recovery. Amy had a great job, great friends. On paper there was no reason why this should happen. Which allows us to reframe the idea that we all have of an addict.”
In the film, Rona (Ronan), a biologist – the filmmakers changed Amy’s name to give them breathing space from the memoir – isolates herself in the Orkneys. While she delivers lambs on sheep farms and counts corncrakes, once-ubiquitous birds on the edge of extinction, she allows her thoughts to swirl as freely as the clouds crowding the sky. Gradually, we piece together the way her “fun” nights turned sloppy, then self-destructive; the way her friends and boyfriend (Paapa Essiedu) fell away.
The Outrun is full of delicate, heart-cracking moments – the astonishment on Essiedu’s face when the first question Rona asks after hitting bottom is, “Wanna go for a drink?” The fear in her voice when she says, “I can’t be happy sober.” Eventually, we understand that her first heartbreak – the mental illness of her father (Stephen Dillane) – will always spill into her life.
“For better and for worse, Amy’s dad really shaped her, and we had to honour that,” Ronan says. “As a child, you want to make your parent happy, and you feel fundamentally it’s your fault that you’re not. Long before you can fully comprehend their mental illness, an emotional scarring can occur that you carry with you your whole life. Not being able to fully trust how your parent will be at any given moment – that can really colour your trust in anyone, because you’re always living on your nerves. Attempting to identify that and understand it takes a lifetime.”
Shooting in the Orkneys’ beautiful, unforgiving landscape, Ronan came to love working with the elements as opposed to against them. In the lambing scenes – she strains to tug a lamb out, then swings it like a kettlebell to get its circulation going – she learned to fake it till she made it. “There’s footage of me delivering my first one – I delivered seven – where I look absolutely petrified,” she says. “But people who work with animals, they’re not precious at all – they’re just, ‘Get in here, hand me that, would ya?’ and I’m like, ‘Jesus, okay.’ There’s no time to indulge, you just have to do the job.”
And after 22 years (!) of working on sets, Ronan says, “I know myself really well. My personal and professional lives feel like they’re in harmony with one another, in a way that feels purposeful. And the people I’m working with are my husband and friends, so we can creatively do a deep dive.”
So it’s no surprise that Ronan plans to direct, beginning with a short film she’s writing and pulling together. From age 9, she made films on her JVC camcorder with friends, but she was never in them. She’d edit as she went, and she loved it. “Working with so many varied directors over the years, being exposed to so many styles of directing, has only made me want to do it more,” she says. “And of course working with Greta over the last 10 years has just solidified it.”
Ronan knows what kind of director she doesn’t want to be: “The older I’ve gotten and the more I appreciate actors, the more frustrated I am when a brilliant actor is put in the hands of a director who doesn’t know how to handle them. I don’t expect to be the greatest director in the world, but I at least want actors to have an ally, someone on set who speaks their language, who isn’t intimidated by them, who isn’t going to work against them. That’s something we do experience a lot, unfortunately.”
Rona struggles with the idea of happiness. Ronan seems determined to keep expanding hers. “You’re never going to reach the stage where you know everything, that’s kind of the wonderful thing about what we do,” she says. “Each project is its own complete experience, and you’ll never have another quite like it. When I was younger I found that very painful, but from the age of 12, I’ve chosen projects for the right reason – the integrity of the work. But I can’t just do the same thing any more. I have a level of skill now, and I want to be pushed and tested.”
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