Saoirse Ronan Says Being A Child Actor Shaped Her — For The Better
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This is Fresh Air. I'm Terry Gross. Our guest is four-time Oscar nominee Saoirse Ronan, the star of Little Women, Lady Bird, and Atonement, stars in two very different new films, The Outrun and Blitz. She spoke with Fresh Air's Anne-Marie Boldenaro.
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, Thank you.
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?
You don't remember. Dana, I'm so sorry. Whatever I did... I'm not drinking anymore. I'm sorry. I'm so tired of hearing you say that.
I can't hear you say that again.
What do you mean?
I don't even recognise you anymore. I wish you were a completely different person.
Don't say that. I can't do this. What do you mean you can't do this?
I just can't do this.
Shh. I'll never do that again, right? Whatever I did, I'll never do it again. I'm never gonna drink again. I promise you, right? Because I don't want to lose you. I don't want to lose you. Please don't go.
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 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.
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