Saoirse Ronan on her producing debut ‘The Outrun’ and collaborating with Steve McQueen on ‘Blitz’
Across her 20-year career, New York-born Irish actress Saoirse Ronan has proven her commercial appeal on both sides of the Atlantic, through the likes of Atonement, Brooklyn, Little Women, Mary Queen Of Scots and Lady Bird, without going near a Hollywood studio franchise – a rare feat.
She is now using her bankability to hoist up her own projects, starting with Nora Fingscheidt-directed Sundance premiere The Outrun. Based on Amy Liptrot’s 2016 memoir of the same name, Ronan plays Rona, a woman from the Orkney islands who struggles with alcohol addiction while living in London and returns to her native Scotland in search of sobriety.
Ronan’s husband, Scottish actor Jack Lowden, came across Liptrot’s memoir during the pandemic. UK producer Sarah Brocklehurst had optioned the book rights in 2019, so Ronan, Lowden and Dominic Norris began developing the project, through their joint production banner Arcade Pictures, with Brocklehurst. (Ronan and Lowden stepped away from Arcade earlier this year.)
“I was definitely creative when it came to my input. I had no idea about budgeting and financing. I’ve obviously learned more about it since,” says Ronan regarding her producer role. She identifies scheduling, casting and working “pretty extensively” with Fingscheidt on the script as her principal producer duties.
She also had a clear vision of wanting The Outrun to be in cinemas, yet early conversations with studios that Ronan had previously worked with showed little promise. “How they had built up their slate was changing,” Ronan was told. “There was a very strong chance that The Outrun would have ended up on a streaming site.”
The film was set up independently, with funding from BBC Film and Screen Scotland, in co-production with Germany’s Weydemann Bros and Studiocanal, and shot in London and Scotland during the summer of 2022. A September release in the UK and Ireland by Studiocanal yielded healthy box office totalling $2.9m (£2.3m), while Sony Pictures Classics’ North American run grossed $900,000.
Authenticity was key. The support group Rona joins in the film, for example, featured real addicts in recovery. “They’ve gone to the depths of their soul to get to where they are now, which produces an honesty and a sense of humour about it all,” says Ronan. “If I hadn’t experienced that first-hand, it’s not an aspect I would have incorporated into the character.”
Ronan also had to mine personal experiences in preparation for the role. “I spoke to friends of mine who are in recovery and struggled with drink. I have friends who are very close to me, some have dealt with alcoholism and have come out the other side, but will always be scarred by it, and other people in my life who have never thought there is a problem and never got the help they needed. The pain of that, which is something I have experienced my whole life, has shaped me. It was always a topic I wanted to explore one day.”
During the shoot, Ronan was undertaking Zoom singing lessons for Steve McQueen’s Blitz. The Apple-backed film began shooting six weeks after The Outrun wrapped. “I’m terrible at multi-tasking when it comes to projects,” she reflects. “That’s why the singing lessons were great, it was a slow easing into the project.”
The release of both films this year means Ronan – who has four Oscar and five Bafta nominations under her belt – is positioned for awards attention both as leading (The Outrun) and supporting actress (Blitz).
War footing
Ronan was not new to stories set in the Second World War – Joe Wright’s Atonement and Peter Weir’s The Way Back both take place during the period. But Blitz, in which she plays Rita, the single mother of a biracial nine-year-old child grappling with whether to evacuate him from London, was a different experience.
“It’s not often there’s a lot of time given to the communities left at home, and how society shifted so much, especially for the women who were left,” says Ronan, who refined her cockney accent by watching footage from the period of young working-class London women.
She had not crossed paths directly with McQueen, although Lowden had appeared in his TV series Small Axe. “When you work with a brilliant director, it’s like gold dust,” she notes. “Jack would come back from filming Small Axe and [said he] had never worked with anyone like [Steve] before, who had the mind he had, who valued actors as much as he does.”
Ronan began 2022 filming Garth Davis’s Foe in Australia, then pivoting to The Outrun. “It had already been what I would deem a big year,” she says. “I was ready for a break.” But then McQueen came calling.
“It was the first time in a long time I was properly pitching myself,” she says, recalling her Zoom calls with the filmmaker ahead of landing the part. “‘I can do accents, sure I can sing, I can be a mother, I can do all these things,’ not knowing if I actually could.”
In early November, Apple gave Blitz a brief but wide release in UK and Ireland cinemas, grossing $1.2m (£940,000) at press time following a world premiere as the BFI London Film Festival’s opening-night film. The drama also had a limited theatrical release in the US before landing on Apple’s streaming platform on November 22.
Looking ahead, Ronan says she “would love to be able to do more in my own accent. I’ve made a conscious effort to do it in films that aren’t set in Ireland. Growing up, it’s essential for any Irish, Welsh or Scottish actor to be able to do other accents because for a long time, and probably even now, if you can only do our accent, you’re probably only going to get cast as the maid in Bridgerton.”
The actress’s next project afforded her that opportunity: Swedish filmmaker Jonatan Etzler’s English-language debut Bad Apples, which Ronan shot in Bristol earlier this year. “There was never any discussion about how an Irish woman ended up in the UK in 2024,” she says.
And while Ronan is not ruling out more producing, “I don’t see myself as a producer at all,” she demurs. “I just want to see myself as someone who wants to have a hand and actually shape the film.”
She has a couple of “very personal” projects she is looking to develop alongside Lowden and is keen to turn her hand to directing, but for now, acting is her bread and butter. While she confirms she will not be turning up in a superhero film at this point in her career, she is keen to work more in the commercial space.
“I’ve dedicated so much of my time to independent film, which I love so much,” she says. “But there is something nice about making a movie and knowing people are going to see it. Especially in this landscape, where there’s so much uncertainty.”
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