In 2020, at the height of the pandemic, Jack Lowden picked up one of the many books collecting dust on his shelf. The Scottish actor had bought a copy of journalist Amy Liptrot’s 2016 memoir The Outrun several years prior when he was visiting Orkney, a chain of remote islands off the northern coast of Scotland, but had yet to dig in. Lowden often seeks out books with connections to the places he travels to, and Liptrot’s brutally honest account of addiction and recovery brought Orkney to life in sweeping detail. After devouring it in one sitting, he knew the story would make an incredible film. And he knew just the person to play Liptrot: four-time Oscar nominee—and his now wife—Saoirse Ronan.
“Jack ran into the room with his copy of The Outrun and said, ‘This is the next role you have to play,’” Ronan recalls. “I read it straight away and was so engrossed with Amy’s story and the poetry of her writing style. To imagine how we could translate it to film and what playing this character could afford me as an actor was incredibly enticing.”
In theaters now, The Outrun stars the Irish actor as Rona, a fictionalized version of Liptrot who spends her 20s drinking and drugging her way across London. After losing her home and her boyfriend—a stellar Paapa Essiedu—as a result, Rona returns to the farm in Orkney where she was raised in a last-ditch effort to get sober.
Ronan carries the film squarely on her shoulders. She is in nearly every minute of its two-hour run time—the story told largely in flashbacks, with the occasional animated sequence in which Rona ruminates on Scottish folklore folded in—and pulls off what might be the defining performance of her career, almost certain to snag her a fifth Oscar nomination. Liptrot spends most of the book in Orkney, alone with her thoughts, listening to EDM music and self-reflecting as she stares out at the ocean. While the film uses some voiceover narration to tackle that interiority, Ronan often communicates as much with just a furrowed brow or quivering lip.
“It was all about honoring the messiness of this woman’s life but also grounding it in empathy,” Ronan says. “Having seen people I love be so affected by this particular illness, it was very important to me personally to give this woman’s story the space to be seen in its truest light.”
Not that the film was a walk in the park to make—or even to get made in the first place. After reaching out to producer Sarah Brocklehurst, who had already secured the rights to Liptrot’s memoir, they decided to all go in on the film together. Lowden and Ronan signed on as coproducers and developed the project for two and a half years.
“I had never considered producing anything up to this point, but I’ve wanted to do more than just act for quite a long time,” Ronan says. “I don’t even necessarily see myself as a producer now, but just someone who wants to be involved in the early stages of a project so I can help creatively shape what it becomes.”
The team brought German filmmaker Nora Fingscheidt on board to direct the film and cowrite the screenplay with Liptrot. It was important to all parties that they change the main character’s name early on, both to give Liptrot some healthy distance from the story and to allow Ronan the creative freedom to make it her own. Fingscheidt wrote the script with a loose structure and minimal dialogue, instead offering brief descriptions of what each scene needed to do.
“At first I was really nervous because I’ve never really worked that way before,” Ronan says. “I’m very aware that when filmmakers come along and decide that they want their actors to improv most of a script, it can be quite a mess. But it was the most liberating creative experience of my life.”
Lowden never had any doubts in his former costar, however. (He and Ronan met while filming 2018’s Mary Queen of Scots.) “She’s not an overly precious actor,” he tells Vogue. “She’s an actor who is built for projects that ask a lot of everybody involved, and The Outrun asked a lot of her.”
With a plan to shoot on location across London and Orkney in late 2022, Fingscheidt assembled a small German crew to make the film on a shoestring budget. The production didn’t even have enough money for wigs, so hair and makeup artist Kat Morgan used clay to dye Ronan’s hair the different hues that help distinguish the story’s timelines. Ronan would often start a shoot day with turquoise blue tresses and end with a shade of burnt orange reminiscent of her character in Lady Bird.
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The main challenge for Ronan was performing the flashback scenes in which Rona is in varying states of sobriety. Though no one wanted the film’s tone to veer into melodrama, it was critical to convey the reality of Rona’s deteriorating state. To help her work those moments out physically, Ronan called on Sir Wayne McGregor, the resident choreographer of The Royal Ballet.
“I wanted to make sure that each time we saw Rona under the influence, we weren’t just repeating the same point again and again,” Ronan says. “There are points at which it’s important to look at this character and see that she’s having a great time—she’s dancing and laughing and seems like someone you might love to hang out with for a night. But watching her reach a tipping point is what really grounds you in the reality of her illness.”
Ronan is the first to admit that an introspective drama about overcoming addiction isn’t the most commercial prospect in an ever-shifting film landscape. She had meetings with several studios that were interested in The Outrun yet wouldn’t guarantee a theatrical release, but she and Lowden knew it wouldn’t play quite right on a streaming service. The film is an intimate portrait of a woman battling her demons, but it’s also a love letter to the brutal beauty of Orkney, and it was important to the filmmakers that it be shown on a big screen.
“I’m kind of a purist when it comes to that,” Ronan says. “I’ve only ever done film, and I really value getting to sit in a room of strangers and have a shared emotional experience.”
After The Outrun premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in early 2024, Sony Pictures Classics came on board to release it in North America. (StudioCanal is overseeing its international distribution.) The Outrun arrives in theaters just a few weeks ahead of another Ronan project, Blitz—a glossy World War II epic distributed by Apple Original Films and helmed by 12 Years a Slave filmmaker Steve McQueen. Ronan’s experience filming Blitz couldn’t have been further from the hurdles of producing an indie like The Outrun from the ground up, but both films represent transitional roles for an actor who audiences have watched grow up onscreen for the past two decades.
“It does feel like there’s been a shift,” Ronan says of what she looks for in projects now. “It’s not like when I was a kid and it was all pure instinct—there’s so much more skill and craftsmanship involved now.”
Ronan made her acting debut in 2007, with the one-two punch of I Could Never Be Your Woman, a criminally underseen rom-com in which she plays Michelle Pfeiffer’s daughter, and Atonement, which garnered the then 13-year old her first Oscar nomination. In the years since, Ronan has filled her résumé with character-driven hits, flip-flopping between independent and studio productions. At a time when every rising star seems to eventually find their way to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Ronan has remarkably never attached herself to a major Hollywood franchise. Her highest-grossing films to date are her collaborations with auteurs like Greta Gerwig (Little Women) and Wes Anderson (The Grand Budapest Hotel).
“I’ve never been super conscious of what I’m drawn to, but I feel like I’m constantly evolving with the material,” she says. “It’s similar to how there are certain types of literature or music that you’re really into at various points of your life. It’s all just reflective of where I’m at personally or what I’m craving creatively.”
Having turned 30 earlier this year, Ronan is excited to embrace a new era. After years of portraying young adults, she finally gets to play a character close to her actual age in The Outrun, while in Blitz she plays a mother for the first time—and even gets to sing onscreen. As far as what’s next, Ronan is open to the possibilities. She’ll never abandon independent films, but that doesn’t mean she’d be opposed to fronting some mega-blockbuster if the right one came along.
“What I have an eye on at the minute is the scale of the movies that I’m doing,” Ronan says. “I’ve made a lot of independent films, but I do wanna make some bigger, commercial films because that’s a mode I haven’t really explored as much in my career.”
Lowden, for his part, thinks the sky’s the limit for Ronan. “I’ve acted with her, and now I’ve produced with her, and there’s never been a single moment where I felt like she was lost or didn’t know what she needed to do,” he says. “She’s like a Swiss Army knife.”
The couple would love to produce together again, but they need to have some personal connection to the material. It’s important for them to not just throw something on a slate but really get involved in the development process. Lowden is particularly passionate about bringing more work back home to his native Scotland and Ronan’s native Ireland, while Ronan would love to take a cue from her pal Gerwig and try her hand at directing someday.
“I’ve been working as an actor for something like 20 years, and as much as I love it—which I still really do—my relationship with it has changed over time,” she says. “I’ve gained so much experience through the hundreds of brilliant people I’ve worked with, and I’d like to just take on some more responsibility.”
Ronan likens her situation to a footballer who’s served their time on the pitch and goes on to coach. Though she assures me she won’t be abandoning acting anytime soon, Ronan is eager to shepherd the next generation of performers. She’s certainly worked with enough directors to know how she’d like to manage a set.
“It’s difficult when you’re working with a director who isn’t upfront about their intentions,” she says. “I have found, being a child actor and working with other people who were child actors, specificity is quite important to us. I feel like I thrive when I know what the boundary is and I can work within them.”
But she doesn’t want to get too ahead of herself. She still has to get through the release of two major movies this fall and the very real possibility of becoming a double Oscar nominee come next year. Ronan lives a relatively low-key life with Lowden back in London, so when she chooses to commit herself to something, she likes to go all in.
“Both these films—particularly The Outrun—are coming from very deep, interior parts of myself,” she says. “I like to embody the person as opposed to just overintellectualizing everything, and that’s such a freeing experience.”