Strength comes in different forms, and two new films with Irish actress Saoirse Ronan tell the tale. In Steve McQueen’s high-octane World War II drama “Blitz,” set in an embattled London, Ronan is Rita, a single mother searching for her young son who’s disappeared from a train ostensibly taking children to safety in the British countryside. As bombs fall and subway stations flood, Rita is just about the fiercest thing in London, abandoning the bomb factory where she works to find her boy at all costs.
In Nora Fingscheidt’s “The Outrun,” on the other hand, her character of Rona is an alcoholic who summons up the power to fight her demons by turning to the solitude of a remote island off the coast of Scotland.
“I’m delighted that they’ve come out when they have, especially because I have been away for a while,” said Ronan, who began acting before she was 10 and is now a four-time Oscar nominee at the age of 30. “To have two such contrasting characters is great. And I think with ‘The Outrun’ in particular, I can say objectively that I’ve never given a performance like that before.
“At this point, when I feel more grounded in my personal life, to have something that feels very different to anything that I’ve done before is exciting.”
But it came in a rush after Ronan had kept a lower profile in the wake of her 2016, 2018 and 2020 Best Actress nominations for “Brooklyn,” “Lady Bird” and “Little Women.” She’d made the sci-fi drama “Foe” with Paul Mescal, then starred in and produced “The Outrun” with her husband, “Slow Horses”actor Jack Lowden, with whom she’d launched the production company Arcade Pictures.
“It was a small independent film, and we didn’t have a lot of money,” she said of the dark drama about addiction and healing. “There was so much work required of me and everyone else. It was like guerilla filmmaking, and it’s incredibly gratifying to have people respond to it in the way they have. I can tell when someone comes up to me to talk about it that it’s them in some shape or form, whether they’ve gone through that themselves or a family member or loved one has gone through something like that.
“I would say that’s the argument for making independent film. Even though it’s so hard for those first few steps, if you get it to a point where it’s actually going to be seen and it works, it’s the most beautiful experience.”
She said she left “The Outrun”more invigorated than tired, but she still didn’t plan to jump into a new job right away. But the name Steve McQueen changed her mind, particularly when he explained that his World War II movie would be set in the bombed-out streets of London rather than the battlefields of Europe, and that the central character would be a woman searching for her son.
“It started to be built around my own experience as a woman and my relationship with my mother and so many stories of motherhood and womanhood that I’ve grown up with,” she said.
She’d played a mother once before, in 2018’s “Mary Queen of Scots,” but Mary Stuart’s motherhood wasn’t as central to the plot as Rita’s, and Ronan was at a different point in her life back then. “I was 23 and absolutely not at the stage where I wanted to have a kid,” she said. “It felt more poignant to play someone like that in her late 20s when you are more settled yourself. I’ve always loved kids, and I felt like I could tap into that a little bit more.”
But the state of the world rather than the state of her life made for the shoot’s most difficult moments. “I’d be in a bunker with 100 extras and dogs and babies and all. A bomb would go off, and we’d all have to react to that.
“And then we’d wrap for the day, I’d drive home and turn on the radio, and exactly the same thing was happening in reality in other parts of the world. That was quite heavy, that you didn’t really have an escape from it, you know?”
Working with a young boy, Elliott Heffernan, also brought her back to her own days breaking into the movie business at the age of 10. “The world that you enter is so unique and special and exciting, and you are the only kid, so you feel really special,” she said. “And when that ends, it’s heartbreaking. So I was very mindful of that with Elliott.”
And how dramatically has what she’s looking for changed since she was that 10-year-old on a movie set? “It’s different, but in some ways it’s the same,” she said. “I still have a visceral reaction, and that’s really what I listen to. That hasn’t changed in all the years that I’ve done this.
“If I read a script, the telltale sign is that I’ll start to say the dialogue out loud. It seems to be this impulse to not just read it, I want to see what it feels like when I bring it to life in some way. But also, the more you work, the more you have a body of work that you want to protect. If something is going to be added to that, you want it to feel right.”
This story first appeared in the Race Begins issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.
