Ms. Ronan, where is your happy place?
Being in nature is where I feel most at home. I grew up in a very rural part of Ireland. Before cold water swimming was cool, I was doing it from when I was a kid. Right now, it's very invoked to immerse yourself in cold water, but I learned to swim in the river right by my house. I grew up with animals and to me that's a much happier place to be in than a city. I live in a city half of my time now, but it's not my happy place at all. So being able to do a job where I see less people and I can swim with seals is perfect for me.
It must be exciting when you get to do a film that takes place in that kind of natural setting.
It’s wonderful, even for example, in The Outrun, I had an amazing time in nature. It was really interesting because I’d just done a film in Australia that was sort of post-apocalyptic, everything had died, it was all very sort of stark and dry and lifeless. And then I came back to Orkney Islands in Scotland where The Outrun was shooting…
“We needed to honor that and protect it, while still showing it in its most honest form. If we didn’t have the support from her that we had, we probably wouldn’t have been able to make the movie that we made.”
Almost the polar opposite in terms of landscape, right?
And then to come back and be really learning on the job about things like birthing lambs! We had a farmer consultant helping us. You've got to put your leg on them to keep them in place, and then you just like shove your hand up there and hope for the best! (Laughs) That was the first lamb that I delivered, and in the end I delivered seven of them so I was a pro by the time we finished. The film is based on the life of Amy Liptrot, so a lot of it was shot in the same places that she stayed, the farm is the farm that she grew up on, Rose Cottage is where she went to write The Outrun, the café you see in the film is one she would’ve gone to all the time… So it was very much like real and art were merged.
Was it a lot of responsibility to be representing the story of a real life person?
It's really terrifying because you've got so much responsibility on your shoulders, especially when you're playing someone who's gone through something so extreme and devastating. Amy is still a relatively young woman and she's got two kids, she's got her life and her family and her parents who are in the movie. So we needed to honor that and protect it, while still showing it in its most honest form, you know? I think if we didn't have the support from her that we had, we probably wouldn't have been able to make the movie that we made. And I wouldn't have been able to portray her in the way that I did. But she was being like a fellow creator and artist and writer. She had a lot of respect for the process.
It’s quite different from the kind of period pieces people associate you with.
It's true that I don't get to do modern day movies as much as I would like. There's just a freedom that you have where you don't have to filter anything out. I don’t have to double-check to make sure that something is accurate for the time or if there were certain mannerisms or words that hadn't even been invented yet. I remember when I made Brooklyn, there's like certain words that just no one had ever spoken yet. So you’ve got an eye on that. I always do separate prep for time periods when you're working in the past.
Are you actively seeking out period films, or are you simply being offered them more?
It’s just been coincidence really, that I've done quite a few period pieces. I guess a lot of what gets made just is usually period stuff. What interested me about the script for Blitz, for example, is that it took these two wartime stories that we're familiar with, which is the family, and fighting and war, and kind of brought them together in a really beautiful way. In true Steve McQueen fashion, there was a fresh take on a story that we thought we knew very well. And I think the fact that it was going to be told through the eyes of a child meant that there were certain dramatic moments and emotional moments that could be amplified even more because of who our protagonist was. And from a personal point of view, the fact that the war was essentially a backdrop for a relationship between a mother and a child just was so brilliant to me. I thought that was such an incredible idea, it’s something that I would want to see in the cinema.
It’s interesting seeing you in the role of a mother for this film, when not too long ago, we were watching you in coming of age roles like Little Women and Lady Bird.
I think that I've had such beautiful experiences being a part of a coming of age story myself, as you say, where that realization is happening to my character, and I've done that and I've enjoyed that so much. But to watch another young person get to live that out for themselves as a kid and as an actor is, it's just a lovely thing to be a part of. It's a lovely thing to support. But I’m also in a position where I can choose my roles, and not everybody is afforded that opportunity. So I feel very lucky for that. But I do need to keep one eye on not just doing one type of film too much or being seen in a certain way. I'd never done anything like The Outrun before and I'm so glad that I explored that type of role. But now I know I need to do something completely different and I'm always trying to keep it interesting for myself.
“There’s nothing really that’s off the table. There’s no sort of rule book that you have to stick to.”
What do you hope you’ll do next?
I would love to do an action film next! I want play a Bond villain actually. I really want Barbara Broccoli to hire me! I feel like I just want to try everything, but also you're beholden to the Barbara Broccolis and the studios and the streamers where unless you've got all the money in the world, you're waiting for that job to come in.
It would be a nice break for you to do something more lighthearted, that maybe takes a bit less out of you as an actor.
Well, The Outrun, even though there were moments where it was too much, it was also like therapy for me. It was difficult at points, but not enough for me to second-guess the decision to go forward with the project. It was quite invigorating as an actor because you're playing someone who loses all sense of reason, it means that there's nothing really that's off the table. There's no sort of rule book that you have to stick to. I could make her as mean and nasty and broken, or as wonderful and funny and joyful as I wanted from scene to scene. There's no direct path forward. It's very chaotic. So from an actor's point of view, that was really fun actually.
It sounds like you’re treating every film as an opportunity for growth in one way or another.
You're constantly having to adapt to a new work and environment and new people who are all going to have their own way of working, their own kind of specific style. But I think that the great thing about our job is that it is built so much on creative dialogue between one person and another. So whether that's the relationship that an actor has with their costume designer, or the costume designer has with the director, or the director has with the gaffer or with the editor, there's something that we can all learn from one another. Each experience really is specific to that job and it makes it feel quite special. And it becomes like your only world while you're working on a film, which is an intense experience. And I love the organized chaos of it all. I'm starting to kind of step into the role of a filmmaker myself, so I feel like I'm opening myself up even more. I'm more inquisitive now than ever.