Saoirse Ronan
speaker
109 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Nov 2024
Saoirse Ronan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And I was thrown straight onto the Orkney mainland and I had my hand up a ewe and was pulling a lamb out. And I did that seven times.
Yeah.
Oh.
Saoirse Ronan's performance as a precocious young girl in the war drama Atonement got her her first Oscar nomination. She was only 13 at the time, and three other nominations were to follow. One for the 2015 film Brooklyn, about a young Irish woman in the 1950s, torn between her new life in the U.S. and her homeland.
She got two nominations for the film she made with Greta Gerwig, Lady Bird in 2017 and Little Women in 2019. Her other movies include The Grand Budapest Hotel, The Lovely Bones, and Mary, Queen of Scots. This fall, she has two films in theaters.
In the movie Blitz by the director Steve McQueen, Ronan plays a mother living in London with her young son and elderly father, all trying to survive the German bombing campaigns. During World War II. And in the film The Outrun, she plays a young woman whose life is derailed because of her addiction to alcohol. It's based on the best-selling memoir by Amy Liptrott.
Ronan plays Rona, a dramatized version of Liptrott, who's a graduate student living in London when her drinking takes over. She tries different things to get sober, going to rehab, moving back to Orkney, Scotland to help her bipolar dad tend to his goat farm, and then to an even more remote island off the coast of Scotland, where she spends most of her time alone working on nature conservation.
Here's a scene from the outrun. Rona is waking up after a bad night of drinking. She doesn't even remember what she's done, but both she and her boyfriend, played by Papa Esiadu, are both hurt and bandaged up. He's had enough and wants to break up. What did I do last night?
Saoirse Ronan, welcome back to Fresh Air. Thank you. I know you read the book The Outrun and loved it so much that you wanted to make it into a movie, produce it, and play the main character. What was it about the book that you found so compelling?
I think it was the first time that I had been exposed to an addiction story that didn't feel like it was all doom and gloom. It allowed me to get to know the whole person. Amy Liptrot wasn't defining herself by her addiction to alcohol, but was acknowledging that it played a huge part in her life. in the destruction of her life for a long time.
I was really drawn to the fact that we would follow a young woman as she struggles with alcoholism. I think that usually when you think of that as a story, you would imagine Probably a man, you know, middle aged or a woman who's going through a divorce or she's lost her family or, you know, there's there's a sort of domestic sort of element to it.
And the fact that we were going to follow someone who. as bad as it sounds on paper, shouldn't have this addiction. And yet does just reminds us of how this is something that can affect everyone.
Now, you said that there were parts of this story of dealing with it was scary for you because it was too private, something that you hadn't completely explored before. And I'm not sure if you mean like in the film or in your life or both. What was so scary to you about it?
It is a particular topic that is very personal to me. It's an addiction that I haven't struggled with myself, but I've watched people very close to me struggle with it. And some of them have seen the light eventually and others have not. And that's incredibly painful. And I think as someone on the receiving end of that...
And there's a lot of anger and resentment that is born out of that experience because you're not going through it yourself. You don't understand or I certainly didn't understand really how addiction works. I know that's kind of a silly thing to say, but I think unless you actually sit down to examine the effect that addiction
substance is having on your brain, you don't really take the time to unpick it because you're so hurt by it and you're so hurt that it has been chosen over you. And so I think I spent a lot of my life carrying that around with me. But it was, yeah, it was scary. It was scary to hone in on this. It just brought up a lot of pain for me, I suppose.
In this movie, you do some interesting things. You know, your character grew up on a sheep farm. And at one point, your character puts her hands in a sheep to get to help birth a lamb. And at another point, you know, you're in what seems like completely freezing water. Yeah. And the character is connecting with seals who are swimming there and it kind of shocks her into her body.
So you physically did those things.
What was that like? I love to swim in cold water. I've been doing that since I was a kid. So that's like my happy place. That was not a challenge at all. If anything, it was a challenge to pretend that it was freezing cold, like so cold that I just wouldn't get in. So I'm that person. Am I a sheep farmer? I am not. And I was not before this experience.
However, since then, I have gotten in touch with every farmer I know in Ireland and Scotland and been like, let me know when lambing season starts, guys, because I'm ready. It was the most insane experience I've ever had on sheep.
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