As written, the question was meant to be open-ended: “How do you the find emotional truth in a character?” If there’s any connective thread between the various roles in Saoirse Ronan’s impressive body of work (sorry, four-time Oscar nominee Saoirse Ronan‘s impressive body of work), it’s that: some ineffable honesty about the emotional journey she’s carrying through her characters.
Fortunately, Ronan is astute enough and open enough to wrestle with such a question with grace and insight. That’s probably why she’s such a good actress.
“How do you breathe?,” Ronan responded with a laugh when asked about said emotional truth during a recent sitdown with IndieWire. “It sounds a bit pretentious to say, but I have grown up disappearing into the make-believe, and that helps me make sense out of the real world. The fact that I was an only child and I spent a lot of time on my own in my head, and your emotions are sort of your companion, [all] that was being fine-tuned from such an early age, because I got into acting so young. I think when you are introduced to this form of work when you’re that young, and you’re so uninhibited and it’s so pure, it becomes a part of your makeup.”
That’s not to say that Ronan doesn’t think deeply about her work, it just perhaps a bit more reflexive for the star, who has been impressing us on the big screen since she was just 12 years old (breakout role, first Oscar nomination: “Atonement”) and has only continued to that through everything from heart-wrenching period pieces (second Oscar nomination, “Brooklyn”) to Greta Gerwig team-ups of both the sardonic (third Oscar nomination, “Lady Bird”) and the sentimental (fourth Oscar nomination, “Little Women”) varieties.
Process? She’s got it, but it’s so innate at this point that it’s hard to talk about.
“So I don’t know what the process is for me,” she said. “It wakes something up in you that you become very in tune with, very in touch with. That is just our job as an actor. And sometimes it’s exhausting when you’re in your own life and you start feeling that way, but it’s like, you feel an emotion, you try and understand it, and you hold onto it, instead of just letting it fly away.”
Ronan’s latest role finds her adhering to that concept in two-pronged fashion: not just staying with the emotions of a performance, but also understanding them so profoundly that, for the first time, she took on a producing role to help mount the project. Based on Amy Liptrop’s memoir of the same name, Ronan premiered Nora Fingscheidt’s “The Outrun” at Sundance in January, where the addiction and recovery drama was met with wide acclaim.
It was, as always, personal to Ronan: she produced it alongside her now-husband Jack Lowden, a process that opened up new ideas for both actors about what they want out of their careers and the work that goes into them.
Ronan and Lowden read Liptrot’s book while in early COVID-19 lockdown — “quite serendipitous,” the actress said in retrospect,” as “I think we were all becoming quite aware of how we chose to live our life and spend our time and who we spent our time with” — though the book had been on Lowden’s shelves for years and he’d previously spent his own time on the Orkney Islands, where much of the film‘s story takes place.
“It’s a story about a young woman going through something horrendous and wonderful at the same time and just said, ‘Saoirse, you should read the book,’ and it went from there,” Lowden recalled in a recent interview with IndieWire.
Ronan remembers it slightly differently. “As soon as he read it, he gave it to me and he said, ‘This isn’t just one of the best books I’ve ever read, but I really think that this is the next role you have to play,’” Ronan recalled. “And I agreed. I really fell in love with the memoir and how she chose to write about this incredibly painful period in hers and her family’s life. There was so much poetry while it was still grounded in something very real and concrete.”
Still, they both concede, turning the book into a movie wasn’t always obvious. “How on Earth do you make a film out of it?,” Lowden remembers thinking. “I’ve done plays in the past that when they’ve been successful, the instant reaction is, ‘Well, it should be made into a film,’ and it’s like, ‘No, it works as a play, leave it.’ It literally is designed to wash over you.”
Liptrop’s memoir is just that, a memoir, but it’s also part nature book (for much of the film, Ronan’s character Rona travels to far-flung Scottish Isles to both heal and reckon), sort of dreamy, poetic, academic. It’s not the most obvious pick for a film adaptation.
“It’s not your traditional memoir at all, and we knew because of that, it wouldn’t be a traditional movie,” Ronan said. “We didn’t know how it was going to translate, to be honest. The interiority of it is so consistent, and even the way she handles time and memory, it’s complicated to make that work in another medium. But we knew we needed to try.”
The result is a serious offering, the kind of “adult” role that Ronan has flirted with for most of her career, full embracing for the first time here. She knows that. She also knows why that took some time.
“It feels adult in the sense that it’s got a lot of depth to it and it’s sort of all-encompassing, and it’s very much a performance that is drawing from personal experience. It felt very raw. It felt messy,” Ronan said. “I was scared to take that on, but I finally felt grounded enough and centered enough in my own life to go to this place that felt incredibly vulnerable for me. I knew that the character would require a degree of messiness and disjointedness and ugliness that maybe my ego wouldn’t have been ready to give into years ago.”
While you might expect a role like Rona — the singular star of a recovery drama, the gold standard of “wow, this was so hard” parts — would debilitate Ronan in some way, she doesn’t get that at all. Mostly, Ronan said, she really relishes the process, being on set, sharing it with people.
“It’s always been about the work. It’s always been purely about what I’m going to get out of it. I’m doing this for myself, I’m doing this because I enjoy doing it,” she said. “And that’s such a luxury that my profession involves so much of my own enjoyment and indulging, in a way, in my own emotions and my own life and relationships and things like that.”
She’s shared the aspect with her life with Lowden for the last seven years. The pair met while making Josie Rourke’s “Mary Queen of Scots” in 2017, and the ease with which Ronan approaches her work struck Lowden, now an Emmy nominee for “Slow Horses” then, and continues to do so now.
“We met playing husband and wife and we were a lot younger, it feels like a lifetime ago,” Lowden said with a laugh. “That was one of my first major roles in a film and I think she was on her third Oscar nomination by that point, and so it was quite intimidating to walk on set and be opposite someone like her. But it’s evident quite quickly with Saoirse is how comfortable she finds it. It’s not something that she struggles with, it’s something that she does things that most people can’t do, but she makes it look like it’s just making toast. How easy she made it look has still never left me.”
That feeling was also present in “The Outrun.” “She wouldn’t be sat there going, ‘I don’t know how I’m going to do this,’ which is what I do,” Lowden said. “She just does it and walks away with extreme confidence. The ability and the performance is gob-smacking to watch, but what most people don’t get to see is how she goes about it. It’s the ease with which she goes about it that I find, because I’m an actor, the most impressive bit.”
Ronan’s ability to combine her obvious deep-thinking with a clear delineation between work and self is just one of her many gifts. It may be impressive to hear how difficult a role can be or how hard it can be to let the tough one goes, but there’s something different about hearing the opposite.
“You know what the interesting thing is, I don’t think I’ve ever played a character where I’ve gone, ‘I wonder what they’re doing right now?’ I don’t know why,” Ronan said. “Their emotional self can stay with me, but not in a debilitating way, just in the way that you would meet a new person and they have an impact on you, or they influence your character in some way. That’s the sort of effect they have on me. Some of them don’t at all.”
There are, of course, a few characters that even Ronan has not fully let go of, and she lists them in short oder: “Jo March, Rona, Briony Tallis, I couldn’t let go of her for a very long time, because that was such an amazing job.” She comes back to her “Atonement” breakthrough role a lot, a job that seems to have set the stage for her entire career in a multitude of ways.
“I chose to do ‘Atonement’ over this big-budget action film that I’d gotten at the same time,” Ronan said. “Even then, when I was a kid, I was like, ‘This is going to have longevity in a way that that movie may not.’ I always wanted to be involved in as many projects as possible that would last. That didn’t mean that they had to be, or it doesn’t mean that they have to be ‘high-brow’ necessarily, but just I needed to connect them and I needed to feel like they were worth it.”
These days, that means being more picky with her roles, something she knows is a luxury. “The older I get and the richer my personal life is, the more consideration I have to put into saying yes to a job,” she said. “I’m very, very lucky that I’m in the position where I can afford to say yes or no to a job, and I’m very aware of that. But it has to be something that I think is worth my energy. I think the older I’m getting, the more experienced I am, the more I want to be pushed, the more I want to be stretched as an actor. That’s always been there, but I feel like the more of a skillset you have, the more you want to be tested.”
She may have turned down the big-budget stuff for the career-setting work of “Atonement,” but that’s not a no-go sign for those kinds of projects.
“I’ve also kind of got one eye on the fact that I have done a lot of independent pictures, which I love, but I don’t just want to be pigeonholed as ‘the indie girl,’” she said. “I want to do big stuff as well.” Top of mind: “I’ve always wanted to do a musical,” she said when asked about her dream gig. “A lot of people say they want Greta to write us a musical and we’ll do that together. I think that would be really fun.”
She imagines it as being more “Maestro” than “Barbie,” noting that she “couldn’t have loved” Bradley Cooper’s Leonard Bernstein feature more than she does, which seems to be quite a bit. “That movie was big and it had heart, but it was poignant,” she said. “Bradley didn’t shy away from it being entertaining. I think that, in this environment, that is a braver thing to do as a filmmaker.”
Gerwig comes up a lot, too. The projects and people and experiences that Ronan loved at the time, she loves now. They’re touchstones.
“I was very influenced by working with Greta, working with people like Joe Wright, who never shied away from their movie being a movie, Steve McQueen as well,” she said. “They want it to be entertaining. And as much as I want something to be emotionally true, it can still be a show. You always want there to be good quality, but it can be fun, it can have heart, it can be entertaining.” (Ronan’s other big movie this year is Steve McQueen’s “Blitz,” which will open the London Film Festival this week.)
Ronan is effusive and open about most things, but man, does she get going about movies. “People love Spielberg because Spielberg makes movies,” Ronan said. “He loves movies, he loves showing his work off, and he does it in a very authentic way, but it’s a film. And I think especially now, certainly for me as an audience member, I want to disappear into the things that I’m watching. I need a break from reality. I would love to just make more stuff like that.”
The producing aspect of “The Outrun” was, in many ways, a bit of a bonus for Ronan and Lowden. “It was a wonderful experience to take something, a piece of material that you had become a fan of, just a genuine fan of the book, and to breathe new life into it,” Ronan said.
While “The Outrun” was special for both of them, they are not expecting it to be an outlier. “We really want to take our time with it,” Lowden said of their producing plans. “I think the best thing is that we know we want to do it again. We’re just taking our time, because we know the thing about this was that it was so obvious for us to make it and we both wanted to make it as equally as much, so we want to find that again. That’s quite a difficult thing to find.”
They both cringe at the word “slate” and the idea that they might start running around to Hollywood meetings with a long list of projects they have in the works or things they might want to do, stuff to “pitch” or “sketch out” to put on their, ew, “slate.”
“That’s exactly what it becomes: ‘What’s your slate?,’ and it’s like, ‘I don’t know, monkey tennis,’” Lowden said. “I’m glad that we experienced that to know that it’s not what we want to do, and we just want to make stuff that we want to make. I think what we’ve both learned is how we can be of most use to a filmmaker or a writer and learning which lane to get in and which one to get out of. I think more people should go about their jobs like that as well is in our industry, learning when to get out of the way.”
Ronan is more clear: “We’re not ‘producers.’ We’re not [‘Little Women’ producer] Amy Pascal. Amy’s a producer. That’s what she does. It’s in her to do that, to be that. We are not that. We are actors, we are creatives. We want to develop and we want to be in the driving seat.”
She added, “I think more actors need to direct, which is what I ultimately want to do, but for us, the driving force is not to build up our slate and just have as many things on the go as possible, we only want to put our time and energy into something when it’s personal, when we really, really care about the story.”
About that directing bit: Ronan said she’s wanted to direct since she was a kid, “Probably from before I even acted,” she said. “I would always force my friends to be in little short films that I’d directed on a JVC camcorder. I always loved doing that, but I think then working with Greta over the last eight years has just helped me to reimagine what that could look like. I don’t know if I’ll be any good at it, but it’s something that I’ve always wanted to try. I’m going to do it hopefully sooner rather than later.” (She’s not alone, either, Lowden said he’s “desperate” to get into the director’s chair, too.)
For now, Ronan is taking her time with the next big thing. “Maybe we won’t make something for another four years, maybe we’ll find something sooner,” she said. “We have a couple of things that we definitely want to make, one of which is a real passion project for Jack. We both feel like producing and development takes so much time. It’s so stressful. It is so stressful. It’s so very different to just acting.”
But it comes down to something simple, and something Ronan has spent nearly two decades refining, as easy as her final word on the subject: “We want it to be something that we love.” Something that they feel. Sometimes, it can be that easy.
A Sony Pictures Classics release, “The Outrun” is now in theaters.
