Jessie Buckley tenses up just once during our interview. She has every right to do so. I feel bad mentioning it. But it’s the elephant in the room.
As we speak, she is the unbackable favourite to become the first Irish woman to win the Oscar for best actress. Does she pretend it’s not happening? Does she feel the pressure building?
“I ... don’t ... know ... how ... to ... answer ... that ... question,” she says in a voice that suggests toothache has suddenly set in.
That’s understandable. Yet here we are. Some reckon the Norwegian actor Renate Reinsve could take it for Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value. Maybe Rose Byrne could sneak in for If I Had Legs I’d Kick You.
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But, ever since a sensational premiere at Telluride Film Festival, in August, Buckley’s turn as Agnes Shakespeare, wife of Paul Mescal’s William Shakespeare in Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet, has seemed the only serious contender.
The character’s grief at the death of her young son – after whom the film is named – is so emotionally abrasive that one almost feels embarrassed to share an auditorium with it.
“I don’t know how to answer that question,” Buckley repeats. “What I am proud of is that a woman like Agnes exists on screen. If someone was to ask a 15-year-old version of myself what I wish there was in the world, it would be that there was somebody like Agnes on screen. Someone who had that full and complex life force. Someone to reflect it was okay to live like that.”
It is, of course, impossibly vulgar to express admiration for a performance through the medium of the compromised sport that is Oscarball. Either side of that question, Buckley and Mescal do a good impression of seeming as if they actually enjoy the conversation. (Mind you, they are actors.)
[ Jessie Buckley is unbeatable at the Oscars. Unless this happensOpens in new window ]
You could not hope for more helpful interviewees. Buckley, always at home to a diagonal smile and a Kerry-born cackle, leans into the question like a skier leaning into a bend. Mescal, a famously calm presence, allows the words to flow out in a gentle adagio.
Who would not be relaxed in such a situation? Zhao’s take on the much-loved novel by Maggie O’Farrell has won the audience prize at virtually every festival it has played. Never mind the pointy-headed critics. The folk in the balcony love this delicate pastoral tragedy.
Yet, watching Agnes curl into despair following Hamnet’s death from the plague, more than a few have worried whether Buckley was able to shake that grief off each evening.
“I love it,” she says. “Everyone’s been, like, ‘Are you seeing a therapist now?’ Look, when you get to do work like this it’s an absolute privilege and a pleasure. This is what we all dream of doing. Touching the void. Becoming more human. Telling stories in a potent and poetic way and making cinema. It’s about making cinema that has a visceral effect on an audience. That’s what storytelling is meant to be.”
Yet she seems to admit the part did hang around with her.
“The weeks of Hamnet’s death, I knew that it was going to be too much to have to come home,” she says. “I needed to stay close to set, to be in that mindset for myself – and, similarly, to be in the woods. I can’t stay on the 10th floor of a hotel where there’s cages outside my window. I need to be in nature. And so I found a little shepherd’s spot in the middle of the forest.”
[ Hamnet review: Five stars for Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal’s devastating filmOpens in new window ]
We will come back to that. But let us now wrap ourselves in the Tricolour and consider these aristocrats of the Irish theatrical ascendancy. Buckley, an all-rounder of astonishing range, has been on the radar since coming second in I’d Do Anything, the BBC’s talent show aimed at finding new leads for a West End Production of Oliver!, in 2008.
Despite almost immediately securing a revival of Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music, the Killarney woman went off to study at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, in London. She was Marya in War & Peace for the BBC. She won a hatful of awards for her role as a wayward Scottish country singer in the film Wild Rose, from 2018.
By the time she secured her first Oscar nomination, for Maggie Gyllenhaal’s film The Lost Daughter, in 2022, her name was already whispered in awe.
“I look back at that time and I think, How brave of that young girl,” Buckley, who is about to turn 36, says of I’d Do Anything. “Right? I was 17, and all I had was raw passion. I still have raw passion, and that’s all that matters in terms of the industry – your commitment and curiosity to tell stories as passionately and as humanely and as openheartedly as possible.
“I hadn’t any training. I had no technique. I was so thrilled to be part of it. At that moment, music and singing felt like a vessel big enough for me to express the feelings inside me that felt like volcanoes. It wasn’t really until I discovered Shakespeare that I could consider myself an actor – because the words were so full.”
Anyone who hasn’t seen her blistering rendition of As Long as He Needs Me on I’d Do Anything needs to go back and check out the YouTube clip while muttering the words “I had no technique” to themselves. One can scarcely imagine how it would have sounded if she actually had that training.
It was on The Lost Daughter that Mescal entered Buckley’s story. Few actors have made such successful use of an unexpected breakthrough as he made of the pandemic furore around Normal People.
Raised in Co Kildare, Mescal was not exactly an unknown. Shortly after graduating from the Lir academy of dramatic art, at Trinity College Dublin, he was cast as the lead in a popular production of The Great Gatsby at the Gate Theatre in Dublin. But that TV adaptation of Sally Rooney’s second novel really got a stranglehold on the world’s attention.
They didn’t have any scenes together in The Lost Daughter – a gripping take on an Elena Ferrante book – but it seems they did meet up during production. That professional relationship gained new shapes during the making of Hamnet.
“I think we entered the film at the perfect juncture,” Mescal says. “I had a deep admiration for Jessie, both personally and professionally. But we didn’t really know each other to the extent we got to know each other. It’s kind of the dream way to start. Because there are no preconceived ideas. I was so curious. I was so fascinated about how Jessie might work. And I think, weirdly, we both work in similar ways.”
“There is either chemistry or there’s not,” Buckley says. “When there’s not it’s horrendous.”
I am not dumb enough to ask either for examples where they have failed to generate such chemistry with a costar. But I do wonder whether they can overcome such an obstacle.
“I think it’s very difficult to get past that,” Mescal says.
“You can. But it doesn’t become the thing; it becomes something else,” Buckley says. “But there was an undeniable energy and chemistry between us – and within that was so much trust.”
Have we got used to seeing Irish actors in this position? Buckley is being inked in for that Os**r. Mescal was, alongside Glen Powell, Austin Butler and Michael B Jordan, among others, occupying the cover of last month’s Hollywood issue of Vanity Fair magazine, within which he was described as cornering “the market for approachable-looking characters with tortured souls”.
I remember, as a teenager, literally seeing the institution of the church in Ireland disintegrate in front of your eyes
— Paul Mescal
I suppose they did grow up after Ireland’s mid-1990s boom. Maybe they are more comfortable with the notion of Irish cultural dominance than those who came of age during mass emigration and The Riordans. Or maybe not.
“It was the Celtic Tiger,” Buckley says. “Capitalism was at its strongest. Objects were important. What was deemed successful for both men and women was what objects you could acquire, not about your soul. I think, in that time, I felt very lost and found huge comfort in discovering Katharine Hepburn and seeing the untethered brilliance of her mind and her body and how fun that was.”
Growing up in Killarney, where her parents ran a guest house, she seems to have connected strongly with those older stars.
“There was Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck, Katharine Hepburn, Judy Garland,” she says. “They lived with the life force on the outside of their skin. There was Gena Rowlands. These were uncompromising women. They were women who contained multitudes.”
The relatively modest age difference between the two led to them growing up in different Irelands. Mescal, who turns 30 in the new year, was not yet a teenager when the economy dramatically unravelled in 2008. The country he talks about sounds surprisingly like the one I remember.
“I was a Celtic Tiger baby, but, yeah, I would associate my teens with the recession,” he says. “But the big thing for me was growing up ... not in a massively religious family but definitely with the hangovers of going to Mass on Sunday, and then being confronted with the allegations against the church. I remember, as a teenager, literally seeing the institution of the church in Ireland disintegrate in front of your eyes.”
Mescal’s chief fixation as a young man was sport. He played Gaelic football for Kildare at minor and under-21 level, but he was forced to give it up after a jaw injury. It never crossed his mind that he would grow up to be an actor.
“The recession was a big thing for me in terms of actually becoming an actor, because I was, like, ‘Nobody’s going to have a f**king job anyway,’” he says. “I remember being so scared seeing money being tight at home and thinking, It’s f**ked anyway.”
It feels almost as if he’s talking about Ireland in the 1980s. People formed bands because they felt nothing else was going to fill their working day.
“When you don’t have choice, you can do the one thing that you feel compelled to do,” he says.
“Ireland is now so full and thriving,” Buckley adds. “It went through, maybe in the best way, a moment of trying to be curious about something that was never part of our DNA. Now there’s a vibrancy. They are incubating an identity now. The creativity is born out of those moments. It feels like such a rebirth.”
Becoming a mother has made me more honest. When you feel the connection, the purest connection of your life, then that’s it. What else are we doing if we’re not actually connecting?
— Jessie Buckley
Both Mescal and Buckley seem to have found a way of striking the balance between openness and privacy. They manage to be chatty and informal on the interview circuit but still keep the things that matter reasonably private.
Nothing illustrates that better than the elegant discretion Buckley brought to conversations about her marriage in (we think) 2023. It eventually emerged on a food podcast that she and Freddie – who worked in mental health – had got hitched quietly a few months before the recording. “I’m very happy,” she said civilly and finally when, in early 2024, I asked her about the marriage.
Coverage of her recent pregnancy was also kept politely minimal, but it’s not the sort of thing you can entirely hide away. In April, at the CinemaCon event in Las Vegas, she brought her bump along when promoting Maggie Gyllenhaal’s upcoming The Bride! Later, as Hamnet premiered at Telluride, in Colorado, she was accompanied by an actual baby. The response to the film was beyond their most optimistic expectations.
“Chloe asked the audience to close their eyes and take three breaths,” she says. “I had my six-week-old daughter with me. And Telluride is so sensory. You go and see all these extraordinary films. You have the best film-makers and their singular imaginations expressing themselves. They are people who love film. And it’s just such a thrill.”
But it must be a challenge manoeuvring a baby about one of the world’s great film festivals. Such events are not exactly designed for families.
“It’s actually been a little bit of a gift,” she says. “For me, becoming a mother has made me more honest. When you feel the connection, the purest connection of your life, then that’s it. What else are we doing if we’re not actually connecting? And I’m so proud of this film. Even promoting it feels like the next journey.”
Zhao, the Oscar-winning director of Nomadland, brings an admirably crepuscular touch to her adaptation of O’Farrell’s novel. Shot largely in Wales, Hamnet begins as the most oblique of love stories before moving on to that central triggering catastrophe.
Buckley dominates the latter half with a performance that moves from coiled interiority to cacophonous rage. But Mescal’s characteristically muted turn as Shakespeare has also attracted much enthusiasm. It’s a tricky challenge. He is playing a man we know and don’t know. Shakespeare has spilt his psyche into his art, but we are not even sure what he looked like.
“The preconceived historical idea of him, to me, is very boring,” Mescal says. “He doesn’t live his life thinking he’s a genius. He can’t live his life like that. He lives his life like how I think we live our lives. I want to tell stories. I want to make things people respond to. And he makes sacrifices. He asks his family to sacrifice certain things so that he can go off and do the thing that he is most compelled to do.”
We meet at the start of a long, long awards season that will take them up to the Oscars in March 2026. Most attention will be on Buckley, but Mescal looks certain to add a best-supporting-actor nomination to the best-actor nod he secured for Aftersun, in 2023.
There is also new work on the way. Mescal is about to play Paul McCartney in Sam Mendes’ four-part biographical study of The Beatles. Next spring we will see Buckley as the title character in Gyllenhaal’s take on Bride of Frankenstein.
“There is so much I could talk about them,” Mescal says of The Beatles. “But I will talk about that forever in a year’s time or in two years’ time. I don’t want to load everybody up at the moment. But I’m in it. And we haven’t started yet.”
What about Gyllenhaal’s feature? The trailer suggests we are in for something else: gothic, comic, noisy, off the wall.
“It’s disobedient. It’s punk. It ripples with petrol on fire,” Buckley says. “I had an absolute blast making it. Last year I got to embody two great female characters who are behind giants. Right? Cultural giants, archetypal giants: Frankenstein and Shakespeare. And we gave them voice, led by two extraordinary directors who happen to be women.”
With that we must part and they must get sucked back into the promotional whirl. Sorry for to having to ask that awkward Oscar question, but Buckley knows the way it is. Right?
“Ah, it’s your job,” she says with an airy smile.
Hamnet is in cinemas from Friday, January 9th; you can read Donald Clarke’s review of it here
