Saoirse Ronan has been a working actor for 20 years, but this was her first at the Telluride Film Festival. Back in 2017, Lady Bird premiered at the festival, but Ronanwas filming Mary Queen of Scots.
So when Vanity Fair sat down with Ronan on Sunday, it was clear she was soaking in how special this mountain festival really is. She had struggled on the first day with the altitude, but was now enjoying the laid-back atmosphere that distinguishes it from other festivals, where talent is often rushing from red carpets to junkets, all the while trying to juggle the crowded, paparazzi-strewn streets. “I’ve never been to a festival like this before where it really does feel like it’s about the films,” she says. “There’s nothing about it that makes you feel like you’re on show – it feels more in line with the experience of actually making a film.”
While screening her new film The Outrun, Ronan also received a Silver Medallion at the festival this year. She’s one of the youngest actors to ever receive the honor, but, at the age of 30, has had a longer career than most since she started when she was just nine years old. “Now that my personal life has sort of gone on and progressed, it’s given me more of a chance to reflect on this career that I have,” she says. “So I just love that I was getting to kind of celebrate that in a place like this.”
After breaking out in the 2007 film Atonement, Ronan has grown up on the big screen, blossoming into an indie darling (Brooklyn, Foe) and as a close collaborator with Greta Gerwig, starring in both Lady Bird and Little Women. She’s also grown up in her personal life, marrying actor Jack Lowden this summer. This year, she’ll be seen in both Steve McQueen‘s World War II drama Blitz and the indie The Outrun.
In The Outrun, Ronan delivers a fierce performance as Rona, a recovering addict who travels back to her childhood home in the windswept Orkney Islands. The film, based on Amy Liptrot‘s memoir of the same name, is directed by Nora Fingscheidt and produced by Ronan and her husband, Lowden.
Vanity Fair: I heard it was actually your husband that introduced you to Amy Liptrot’s book.
Saoirse Ronan: Yeah, he had gone to the Orkney Islands probably a year or so before we got together and loved the place, totally fell in love with it. And then we were in lockdown maybe three years after that and he read it for the first time, read it in two days, and as soon as he finished it, he handed it to me and he said, “This is the next role you have to play.” It’s an incredibly personal subject for me as it is for pretty much everyone. I think everyone’s been either directly or indirectly affected by this disease in particular. So it was always a subject that I wanted to explore at some point and I think that was finally the point in my life where I felt strong enough and secure enough to be able to really delve into it and crack it open.
What was the biggest push back you got from potential financiers?
The book isn’t very obviously adaptable. Amy is such an incredible writer, and I was struck most by her prose and the way in which she wrote and the kind of poetry that she used without it being pretentious. It still felt very grounded. And that’s beautiful to read, but— because it’s so sort of nonlinear and almost deconstructed in the way it’s presented as a book—to then adapt that into a screenplay, which, for the most part, needs to run in a certain way, that was always going to be difficult. So much of it is memory-based or it’s a thought that she has that’s very, very distant, and then you’ll tap into that for a minute and then you’re out of it again.