If there is a single moment in Hamnet that secured Jessie Buckley her best-actress Oscar, it is the howl that emerges from Agnes in the rawness of her grief. It is primal, instinctive and distressing, an anguished cry that sends her neck lurching forward into an abyss of maternal devastation.
She expels the sound from her body, extending its balloon of pain and rage, Chloé Zhao’s direction framing her in profile, until all the stricken Agnes is left with is one of those gaping, gasping silences that invariably follow a sob as full-blown as this. Buckley is not Buckley as she unleashes it, and yet, of course, she is.
Her Agnes, wife of William Shakespeare, is no fluke. Officially, you win an Academy Award for one powerhouse performance, not for the span of your career, and this is true here, too, though the 36-year-old from Killarney also happens to have amassed a CV that amply demonstrates her versatility, total commitment and what she sometimes refers to as her humanity. The first Irishwoman to win the Oscar for actress in a leading role is a generational talent.
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Buckley rarely plays the Everywoman, more typically inhabiting women on the periphery or the verge, but she has to-die-for range. She can do guileless or knowing, reserved or uncontained. She can be a transmitter of glee, ecstasy, dread, fear or confusion – or, better still, the source of those emotions in people around her.
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What she does with her eyes is subtle, yet deep feeling radiates from her glints, her hard stares, her pooled tears. In Maggie Gyllenhaal’s film The Bride!, Buckley’s current cinema release, the often higher upturn to the right side of her mouth is masked by a comic-book stain from the black “crystalloid solution” she vomits up when her corpse is reanimated, but in her naturalistic roles this feature needs no augmentation.
It is one of Buckley’s acting superpowers, and she uses it at will to convey relish, disgust and bafflement.
Her vocal command is as strong as might be expected from someone who, at the age of 18, competed to be cast as Nancy in a West End production of Oliver! via the BBC talent competition series I’d Do Anything, imbuing her musical numbers with a maturity beyond her years and finishing second in the public vote.
“She’s a completely strange, unique person, but I think she’d be sensational,” said Cameron Mackintosh, the stage show’s producer, who wanted her to win. It’s easy to imagine a queue of casting directors coming to similar conclusions.
But what stands out most from a rewatch of Buckley’s screen credits is not her voice nor her facial expressions: it’s her entire physicality. It’s there in Hamnet, where her every darting movement in the Globe Theatre crowd brings the audience with her, whether we’re sold on the film’s “transformative power of storytelling” message or not. And it’s there in The Bride! in spades.
The comedy-fantasy, which has elicited mixed reviews, has bombed at the box office – a bomb is practically a rite of passage for the reigning holder of the best-actress Oscar – but Gyllenhaal has the good sense to exploit her lead’s capacity for the theatrical, and Buckley duly thrusts and staggers and dances through this perfectly fine entertainment, enjoying the well-earned indulgences of a star.
She has been mocked, sometimes gently, sometimes with genuine derision, for the gushing quality to her acceptance speeches and publicity interviews – she’s hardly alone among actors there – but she is a reliable narrator of her own skill and artistic intention, using words like “elemental” and “volcanic” to describe herself or the women she plays.
“There is a confidence about her even though she has this very delicate, kind of available, self,” Buckley said on Desert Island Discs, on BBC Radio 4. She was talking about not one of her characters on this occasion but her mother, Marina Cassidy, a music therapist and harpist, yet it’s a line that could be written about her own nuanced performances.
After studying at Rada, the prestigious London drama school, she resurfaced in War & Peace, a six-part BBC series that aired in 2016 (and is available on RTÉ Player).
The path from Saturday-night shiny-floor show to Sunday-night costume drama is not well trodden, and previewers treated the casting of the young wannabe from I’d Do Anything as a curio, though it soon became apparent that a little light Tolstoy was well within her capabilities. Princess Marya is devout and meek, but Buckley deftly reveals her inner steel.
“Still the same little crybaby?” inquires her brother, Prince Andrei (James Norton), in her first scene, and Buckley does indeed get to announce her crying skills as Marya, most movingly when her father (Jim Broadbent) breathes his last. There is a small-screen stillness as she clasps his hand and a single tear rolls down, the quiet dawning of her loss contrasting with the howls of Hamnet.
Buckley rose independently of the Irish industry, with her BBC era continuing in 2017 courtesy of the wonderful Taboo. Her curly hair, flattened for the plain-styled Marya in War & Peace, springs back on to screen in Steven Knight’s 1814-set BBC-FX Networks co-production (now on Netflix).
Exuding a compelling blend of defiance and vulnerability, she is Lorna Bow, a spirited London actor who spars with gravelly renegade James Delaney (Tom Hardy) while still finding time for Shakespeare (by playing Portia in The Merchant of Venice).
The series, fuelled by her chemistry with Hardy, was regrettably short-lived, but it properly introduced Buckley as a screen presence too charismatic to ignore.
Later that year she received top billing – the credits sequence was in alphabetical order – as Honor in the BBC drama The Last Post (also on RTÉ Player). Her fish-out-of-water army wife is at first overshadowed by Peter Moffat’s account of the dying days of British colonial rule in Aden, but nobody puts Buckley in the corner, and she soon combines with frustrated alcoholic Alison (Jessica Raine) to outclass the “chaps”.
Film-makers were already knocking on her door. In Beast she plays Moll, a young woman haunted both by her own past and by the suspected crimes of the man she fancies. Moll is perhaps not as innocent or naive as she seems, and in Michael Pearce’s film, her mouth sullenly set, Buckley fosters that doubt in a performance of mostly understated potency. When Moll abruptly yells at two men getting heavy with her, she does it with such weaponised ferocity that they back off, afraid.
On I’d Do Anything, a male choreographer wished for the teenager to be “more ladylike”, but is clear that Buckley, as an actor, has little interest in characters who adhere to fixed notions of femininity, and has instead been drawn to women – from the vengeful, resourceful Moll to the woodsy, witch-like Agnes – who refuse to fit into preconceived ideas of how a woman should behave, and may be, to borrow another word that pops up in her speeches, “disobedient”.
Her bold physicality is all over Wild Rose, in which she injects Rose-Lynn Harlan, a hyperactive, slack-jawed Glaswegian who dreams of becoming a country singer, with a startlingly feral dimension. The clue is in the title. Buckley, unsurprisingly, has the stagecraft in her locker, but Rose also works as a house cleaner, meaning even a solo vacuuming scene in Tom Harper’s film becomes showreel material. She was rewarded with her first Bafta nomination.
Buckley was soon gaining new admirers, keeping company with A-listers and graduating to a trio of Oscar-adjacent films. In the biopic Judy, from 2019, she was the prim foil to Renée Zellweger’s Judy Garland, and when Zellweger won the best-actress Oscar and a string of other awards in early 2020, she acknowledged Buckley in each of her acceptance speeches.
Then came The Lost Daughter, Gyllenhaal’s adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s novel (as translated into English by Ann Goldstein). Its lead, Olivia Colman, recommended Buckley for the part of the younger Leda, a woman who struggles with the identity-draining strains of motherhood.
Leda is shockingly petulant with her children – “This is my doll. You can’t treat her like s**t,” she tells her daughter – and you fully believe she will become the shattered, spiteful person portrayed by Colman. Both women received Oscar nominations in 2022, with Buckley’s nod for actress in a supporting role marking her first.
She didn’t win, but she was back in the Dolby Theatre a year later to hug the Canadian writer-director Sarah Polley as she claimed the best-adapted-screenplay Oscar for Women Talking (which is on Prime Video and Mubi).
Polley’s adaptation of Miriam Toews’s novel centres on a group of American Mennonite women who discover they have been tranquillised and raped by the men in their insular community. Buckley excels as Mariche, who manifests as truculent and derisive of the other women, though we eventually learn why her fury is so misdirected.
Mariche has forgiven her violent husband again and again, as she was culturally expected to do, and it has left her in a state of blinking hurt. “Who are any of you to pretend I have had a choice?” she says, brimming over as she embodies the damage of sustained marital abuse. It is one of the Kerrywoman’s best performances.
Buckley can anchor a film through sheer vibrancy, even when playing a character as slippery and disconcerting as the woman of shifting name and occupation in Charlie Kaufman’s I’m Thinking of Ending Things (Netflix), a surreal horror-mystery in which the camera loves her. On a bleak road trip with her boyfriend, she stares out of the window of the car and down the lens with an unsettling intensity worthy of the genre.
In another foray into horror, Alex Garland’s bizarre Men (available to rent), she delivers a masterclass in pure rage and gulping trepidation. With her hair cut short, you can see the fear on the back of her neck.
In her still-young career, there have been many other roles that have allowed Buckley to fulfil what she sees as her responsibility, as an actor, “to make people feel, rather than becoming disembodied, disconnected, disengaged”, as she explained it to Vogue.
But despite her ascendancy on screen, she has not lost her love of the stage, and in 2022 she won an Olivier Award for best actress in a musical for the West End revival of Cabaret, in which she starred opposite her fellow Oscar (and Olivier) winner Eddie Redmayne.
If she doesn’t already have a dedicated trophy cabinet in her Norfolk home, where she lives with her husband, Freddie Sorensen, and their baby daughter, she should think about investing in one, and not just because this Academy Award completes her sweep of the season.
Buckley is a shape-shifter of unusual conviction, one who has been recognised as such by her peers, and Agnes is unlikely to be the last role to seal her a statuette.
