Saoirse Ronan, Who’s Got a Hit at Telluride, Is Ready to “Get Off Her Arse”

Saoirse Ronan has been a working actor for 20 years, but this was her first at the Telluride Film Festival. Back in 2017, Lady Bird premiered at the festival, but Ronanwas filming Mary Queen of Scots.

So when Vanity Fair sat down with Ronan on Sunday, it was clear she was soaking in how special this mountain festival really is. She had struggled on the first day with the altitude, but was now enjoying the laid-back atmosphere that distinguishes it from other festivals, where talent is often rushing from red carpets to junkets, all the while trying to juggle the crowded, paparazzi-strewn streets. “I’ve never been to a festival like this before where it really does feel like it’s about the films,” she says. “There’s nothing about it that makes you feel like you’re on show – it feels more in line with the experience of actually making a film.”

While screening her new film The Outrun, Ronan also received a Silver Medallion at the festival this year. She’s one of the youngest actors to ever receive the honor, but, at the age of 30, has had a longer career than most since she started when she was just nine years old. “Now that my personal life has sort of gone on and progressed, it’s given me more of a chance to reflect on this career that I have,” she says. “So I just love that I was getting to kind of celebrate that in a place like this.”

After breaking out in the 2007 film Atonement, Ronan has grown up on the big screen, blossoming into an indie darling (Brooklyn, Foe) and as a close collaborator with Greta Gerwig, starring in both Lady Bird and Little Women. She’s also grown up in her personal life, marrying actor Jack Lowden this summer. This year, she’ll be seen in both Steve McQueen‘s World War II drama Blitz and the indie The Outrun.

In The Outrun, Ronan delivers a fierce performance as Rona, a recovering addict who travels back to her childhood home in the windswept Orkney Islands. The film, based on Amy Liptrot‘s memoir of the same name, is directed by Nora Fingscheidt and produced by Ronan and her husband, Lowden.

Vanity Fair: I heard it was actually your husband that introduced you to Amy Liptrot’s book.

Saoirse Ronan: Yeah, he had gone to the Orkney Islands probably a year or so before we got together and loved the place, totally fell in love with it. And then we were in lockdown maybe three years after that and he read it for the first time, read it in two days, and as soon as he finished it, he handed it to me and he said, “This is the next role you have to play.” It’s an incredibly personal subject for me as it is for pretty much everyone. I think everyone’s been either directly or indirectly affected by this disease in particular. So it was always a subject that I wanted to explore at some point and I think that was finally the point in my life where I felt strong enough and secure enough to be able to really delve into it and crack it open.

What was the biggest push back you got from potential financiers?

The book isn’t very obviously adaptable. Amy is such an incredible writer, and I was struck most by her prose and the way in which she wrote and the kind of poetry that she used without it being pretentious. It still felt very grounded. And that’s beautiful to read, but— because it’s so sort of nonlinear and almost deconstructed in the way it’s presented as a book—to then adapt that into a screenplay, which, for the most part, needs to run in a certain way, that was always going to be difficult. So much of it is memory-based or it’s a thought that she has that’s very, very distant, and then you’ll tap into that for a minute and then you’re out of it again.

Was it important to really film on the Orkney Islands?

It was really important because the Orkney Islands—even versus the Shetland Islands, which are further north—the rocks are different. The shapes of the cliffs are different. The people are different. They sound different. They’ve got a different culture and it’s been such a huge part of who Amy is. And in the end, it was the Orcadians locals that actually got this movie made. We couldn’t have shot it without them. I think we needed their expertise on the place. Even when it came to the accent or certain slang words that we were going to use, it was just so helpful to have them around.

Part of her story is her time working on a farm. I heard you learned how to deliver lambs?

The lambing was a little bit terrifying because I was literally delivering lambs. We did two pre-shoots for this film, which is quite unusual for an independent movie of this size because you usually need quite a big budget to do something like that. We would wake up at maybe four in the morning, and then we would just wait with the farmer, Kyle, who was sort of our consultant who oversees three different farms in the area, and when it looked like a ewe was about to give birth, he’d be like, “Okay, we’re going to do it now.” I had him and other farmers in the area show me what to do and then they were like, “Okay, do it and we’ll just film it and see what happens.” And to try and pull a lamb out is really difficult. And then when you do, they’re completely limp, so they look like they’re dead almost. So it was terrifying and I had to look like I’d done it my whole life.

Do you see any throughline to the movies you’re taking on now? I’ve noticed they’re more adult roles, like the fact you’re playing a mother in Blitz.

I haven’t thought about it. I will say that I’ve always wanted to play roles that are different from the last one that I played, but I do feel I have so much experience now at this stage and I’m still so hungry to be pushed and challenged in the way that I always was when I was younger. Because I’m in such a fortunate position at the minute where I can choose, I’ve never just wanted to do a job just for the sake of it. So when I do one, I want it to be one that’s really going to wake me up because it’s almost happened to me a couple of times where you start sleepwalking into a project and then you get into it and you’re like, “Damn it. I got into this for the wrong reasons,” and the work suffers because of that. So I always want to keep an eye on that.

I don’t know if this sounds superficial to say, but I would love to do more big commercial stuff because I think I’ve done a lot of indies, and I love doing them, but it was kind of lovely to go onto something like Blitz where you didn’t have to worry about time or money and the biggest thing is that you know the movie’s going to be seen. Before we sold The Outrun, we didn’t know. We put all this work into it, and we didn’t know if anyone was ever going to see it.

After Sundance, Outrun took a few months to sell. Were you nervous?

Yes, I was. The only experience that I had had at Sundance, which was when the landscape was so different with the industry, was when we had Brooklyn and it sold that night and it was the biggest, biggest sale. It was the bidding war, and [the buyers] were all literally physically there. And everything’s changed so much since the last time I was there, so I was like, “Why hasn’t anything happened yet?” But was my publicist that was like, “Things have changed a lot since we’ve last been here.” And it’s also just the industry’s been shook up in such a crazy way, and I think studios and the money people are a lot more cautious, which I understand to a certain extent.

Greta Gerwig wrote a beautiful piece in the Telluride program about you for your tribute that mentioned she can see you directing someday. Is that the plan?

Yes, it always has been since I was a kid. And then, obviously, acting took off. Also, I was still growing up in a time where we didn’t have Greta Gerwig – we didn’t have these women who were leading by example. And I think working with her had such a seismic effect on me, as she did for so many women to just go like, “Oh, okay.” I truly believe, as most of us do, that she is already one of the greats and she will be put in the category of the Scorseses and the Coppolas, where it was only men before. Greta is already there. And so I think to work so closely with her while that was being realized by the world, suddenly made me go, “Oh, maybe I can do this thing that I’ve always wanted to do.” And it’s not that I think I’ll be any good at it, but I feel like there’s a world now where I can at least try.

I have a short that I’m halfway through and everyone around me, they’re like, “Have you finished it yet?”

You’re halfway through writing it?

Yes, I know what it’s going to be, but I need to just get up off my arse and do it.