Saoirse Ronan's new role delves into alcohol addiction

NEW YORK – “I wish I could live through something,” says the teenage title character in the 2017 movie Lady Bird, yearning for a life beyond suburban Sacramento in the US.

The American-Irish actress playing her, Saoirse Ronan, had already lived through enough for several lives at that point.

Then 23, she had been acting since she was nine and had garnered two Oscar nominations: Best Supporting Actress for Atonement (2007) and Best Actress for Brooklyn (2015).

Lady Bird, American actress Greta Gerwig’s debut as a solo director, would earn Ronan a third. Another followed for her role as Jo March in Gerwig’s Little Women (2019).

In 2024, Oscar buzz surrounds Ronan once again, thanks to her leading roles in Nora Fingscheidt’s The Outrun, which opens exclusively at The Projector on Oct 17; and Steve McQueen’s Blitz, which premieres on Apple TV+ on Nov 22.

Ronan’s career reads as a series of evolutions, pushing into new territory with every role. Over the years, she has played a 1950s Irish immigrant in New York, a child assassin, a vampire, Lady Macbeth and Mary, Queen of Scots.

Now 30, with over two decades of experience in front of the camera, the actress has committed herself in The Outrun to a character containing multitudes: a woman raised in a remote island community who returns to recover from her addiction to alcohol.

“It was so much more than just making a film for me,” Ronan said in a video interview from New York.

She described an experience that was both physically and emotionally demanding: “I think actors are sponges. You’re able to open yourself up to everything around you.”

For The Outrun, that meant swimming in the icy sea, delivering lambs on-camera and going deep into the psyche of a woman in crisis.

The movie unfolds on Orkney, an island off Scotland’s northern coast, and the “outrun” is a windracked stretch of land where farmland gives way to the sea.