Why Saoirse Ronan wanted to play ‘a version of someone that has hurt me’ in “The Outrun”

Plus, the actress explains why she helped birth seven lambs for the new drama: I was “absolutely s—ting myself.”

Saoirse Ronan remembers it like it was yesterday, the moment she was “absolutely s—ting” herself thinking she was “going to kill” the newborn lambs while assisting in their birth.

“I was terrified… ‘What if I kill all seven lambs?'” she recalls to Entertainment Weekly, laughing through her anxiety-filled memories. “When they eventually come out, they’re lifeless, and you essentially have to revive them. You have to vigorously rub the side of their body to get their airwaves clear. So, really, their life is in your hands.”

The four-time Oscar nominee wasn’t thinking about trading in her acting career to become an animal midwife. In fact, it was for work. Some six months before principal photography began on her new movie The Outrun, she was getting into the shoes of her character, Rona, by spending time on a farm on Scotland’s Orkney islands, where she retreats following time in rehab for alcohol addiction and substance abuse. It’s all rooted in real life, based on journalist Amy Liptrot’s 2016 memoir of the same name.

Martin Scott Powell/Sony Pictures Classics

Saoirse Ronan in ‘The Outrun’
“It was such an incredible way for me to get an insight into Amy’s upbringing,” Ronan says of her time in the Scottish countryside. “This is something that she did — and many young people that [my husband Jack Lowden], and I know who grew up on farms, they do that every single year. Sometimes, they’ll come back from college, and they’ll help their parents with lambing season, like a full-time job for three weeks. I had no idea about any of this and the discipline that’s needed, and what’s expected of kids who grow up on a farm. Their social life and everything that they need and want really has to come second.”

It’s a stark change of pace for Rona, a biology grad student studying in London whose life spins out of control when she starts partying too hard, a crutch to escape the traumas of her childhood. Her father’s frightening bipolar episodes often turned violent; meanwhile, Rona’s mother — now separated from her husband — clings to religion, though her prayers just aren’t enough to help her troubled daughter, who is physically attacked after one wild night out on the town.

The movie is a very personal one for Ronan, not just because it’s the first movie she’s produced but also for its “universal” subject matter. “It’s one that everyone has been able to relate to, whether they’ve gone through addiction issues themself, they’ve struggled with their mental health, or they’ve watched a loved one struggle with alcohol, which is me,” she explains. “It’s been a particular substance that I’ve hated. I’ve been angry at. It’s caused me pain and confusion and resentment. There were feelings that I needed to experience, but I was finally at the point where I felt so content and settled in my personal life, and that gave me the strength to really explore it fully and crack it open and understand it as opposed to just being angry at it. So I knew it was going to be an incredibly cathartic experience to bring something like this to life and to be choosing to play essentially a version of someone that has hurt me so much.”

Natalie Seery / Sony Pictures Classics

Saoirse Ronan in ‘The Outrun’
The consequences of Rona’s poor choices impact not just her but everyone in her world — including her boyfriend, Daynin (Paapa Essiedu), with whom she makes an instant and deep connection. But their relationship fractures as she continues to lie and deceive him about her sobriety and mental health. Lowden — “who knows me so well,” she says — originally shared the book with Ronan; she credits him with recognizing that she’d be able to “go to places that I’d never been as an actor before.” But with that, she also understands that clarity about her own life experiences was necessary to take on the role.

“There’s no way I would’ve been able to do that a few years before,” she admits. “A lot of girls I know when they’re younger, they’re just angrier. I had a temper. I was stubborn. I wasn’t clearheaded enough to be able to take a character like this and inject all of what I used [from my] past into this. I wouldn’t realize that that’s what I was like before. So I think I needed to grow out of that and have a clearer view of what those elements of a person’s personality look like in order to be able to incorporate them into this character.”

It was also a role that required her to get “as messy as possible” — not just because of those newborn lambs but how Rona’s drunken nights impacted her physically. In fact, she says the only aspect of the performance that made her nervous was “drunk acting,” which she notes can “be quite caricaturish sometimes.” In addition to watching Stephen Graham’s performance in the BBC series The Virtues, where he played an alcoholic who eventually has to face repressed memories from his past — “I’d never seen that portrayed so brilliantly and so truthfully before, and it was someone who’s in recovery who recommended it to me,” Ronan recalls — she also leaned on advice she got from a previous collaborator.

Martin Scott Powell/Sony Pictures Classics

Saoirse Ronan in ‘The Outrun’
“When you are drawing from your own experience, you don’t have a clear idea of what you are like when you’re drunk,” she says. “So there was a few little bits of information that I’d gathered along the way. One was from Greta [Gerwig]. When we did Lady Bird, [she said,] ‘The last thing a drunk person wants is to appear drunk.’ So you have to be as specific and accurate and articulate in what you’re saying as possible — almost overdo that so that people can tell that you’re making too much of an effort to appear sober.”

But for all of Rona’s troubles, her journey to find happiness without the aid of the bottle is a difficult but worthy one — very different from the scripts the actress has previously read featuring characters with substance abuse issues that were rooted more in rebellion than mental health or personal experience.

“I feel like addiction, especially when you’re following a young person, is either highly glamorized or it’s so dark and depressing and hopeless. And so we wanted to try and find that middle ground,” she says. “It is incredibly hopeful. And there are moments where — and you find this when you speak to people in recovery, they’ve gone to hell and back, and so you kind of have to just laugh at it. They’ve done things to themselves, to others that are so f—ing ridiculous and dark that if you don’t laugh, you’ll cry. So we really wanted to tap into that.”

The Outrun is in theaters now.