As a child, Caitríona Balfe never found it strange when a trip to the dentist or to a clothing store involved driving by British soldiers with machine guns, or having the family car inspected for explosives. There were frequent bomb scares too, around where she grew up in Tydavnet, a small Irish village near the Northern Ireland border, and sometimes on the news she’d hear about a nearby community that had been hit. “It’s such a part of the fabric of your life when you live in those areas,” she says. “It’s really not until you get older that you look back and you realize the craziness of it, or the strangeness of it.”
It’s a warm November day, and Balfe is sitting at an outdoor table at a restaurant in Los Angeles, talking about the concentric circles that are her life and her new movie, Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast. The film is Branagh’s semi-autobiographical take on his own childhood, set in 1969 not long after the violence and conflict known as the Troubles got under way. Balfe plays Ma, a mother of two torn between the fear of leaving her home in Northern Ireland and the desperation to keep her Protestant family safe. As it happens, Balfe has brought her three-month-old baby boy with her to Los Angeles for his first cross-Atlantic trip. Her son didn’t sleep well last night, so neither did she. Mind you, you can’t tell: Balfe still has a fresh glow, seemingly perfect skin, and piercing light blue eyes, all of which make it completely understandable that she spent her 20s as a runway model in Paris.
Even without the nighttime needs of her little one, Balfe, 42, has reason to be tired at the moment. A couple of evenings ago, she attended Belfast’s glitzy L.A. premiere at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, which wrapped up with a late-night after-party where her costar Jamie Dornan belted out “Everlasting Love,” a song his character sings to Balfe’s in the film. The whirlwind promotional trip began a few weeks earlier with the London premiere, and then a hop over to Belfast for the local fête, which was the first time Balfe’s mother had ever attended one of her premieres. In between London and Belfast, Balfe stopped over in Ireland to visit family members she hadn’t seen since before the pandemic. “They hadn’t met the baby. They hadn’t seen me pregnant,” she says, ordering huevos rancheros, excited to be baby-free for a moment and use both her hands to have a civilized, adult meal. “It was like this whole event happened without seeing them.”
Belfast quickly became an Oscar front-runner when it was released by Focus Features in theaters on November 12. Even with a cast that includes Dornan, Judi Dench, and Ciarán Hinds, Balfe is a clear standout. Despite starring on a hit TV show—Starz’s Outlander—for the past eight years, Balfe will likely be set on the path to movie stardom by Belfast, though she waves away that kind of talk. “I feel like I’m at such an early stage in my career because I started so late,” she says, having left Ireland at 18 for that decade-long modeling career. Outlander has earned her fans and a rich role to dig into, but Belfast has brought her to Northern Ireland, and to a story close to her own heart.
“As an Irish person, you read so many of these scripts about the Troubles, and they all have this romantic version of the violence,” Balfe says. “It always upsets me, because I don’t think that’s something that should be romanticized. And here was a script that really focused in on the family and on the people and the communities that are affected.”
For decades, the Troubles gripped Northern Ireland in an extended period of violent unrest, which had a lasting effect on those living in the border towns. The conflict raged from the 1960s to the late 1990s and led to more than 3,500 deaths. It also shaped the lives of so many who grew up in those decades, like Balfe and Belfast director Kenneth Branagh. “It makes you very observant, and it makes you understand how very carefully sometimes people have to tread when, like her, they grew up living on a divide,” Branagh says of Balfe. “You know what it is like to live in a sort of semipermanent code red.”
The fourth of seven children, Balfe and her family moved from Dublin to that village near the border when she was very young, for her father’s job. (Balfe was raised Catholic but has since lapsed.) She’s wanted to act for as long as she can remember, but she’s not exactly sure where the impulse came from. She thinks the fact that her dad—a sergeant for An Garda Síochána, Ireland’s national police service—was in a comedy troupe probably had something to do with it. But her plans took a detour when a modeling scout spotted her while she was studying acting at the Dublin Institute of Technology. A few months later she signed with Ford Models and was offered an opportunity to move to Paris. “I always just wanted to travel,” she says. “Growing up, we never did that—there were too many of us. We didn’t have the money.”
Balfe couldn’t have known that when she left Ireland to work, she would never call it home again. She became one of the most in-demand models working the runways, walking for the likes of Chanel, Valentino, Alexander McQueen, and Givenchy. Over a three-year stretch in the early 2000s, she appeared in hundreds of shows. “There was something about the theatricality of the runway shows—and the event of it—that I really loved,” Balfe says. But it eventually lost its shine as she neared 10 years in the business. “For the last couple of years I was miserable, really,” she says. “It’s not exactly the nicest industry or the healthiest industry.”
By then, Balfe was based in New York, and she started to dabble in acting classes. She was dating a guy who lived in Los Angeles and decided to take another leap to a new city full of strangers. “I knew that I had a passion for acting,” she says. “I knew it was something that, if I got the chance to do it, I would attack it with everything I had.” Balfe was aware she was at a disadvantage as a late starter, even at the not-exactly-old age of 29. Still, she began to build a career, commencing with the smallest of roles in J.J. Abrams’s Super 8. “I didn’t speak and I was the dead mom,” she says with a laugh, “but at least I spent a day with J.J. You kind of feel like, Well, if that person who’s really incredible and successful gives you a sort of seal of approval, then maybe that means something.”