“I’ve never done a Marvel, I’m not on Instagram, I’m probably the least bankable [choice].” Assessing her career in a recent Vogue profile, actor Jessie Buckley highlighted why she is something of a Hollywood anomaly. In an era where social media stardom can determine casting and too many talented young things get caught up in superhero movie purgatory, the 36-year-old star has carved her own path, one that has taken her from reality TV fame to indie movie acclaim. In the process, she has established herself as one of the most fascinating actors working today.
And despite her self-deprecation, she is surely on the cusp of becoming very “bankable” indeed. Her latest role in Hamnet has generated critical acclaim and audience adoration alike, as well as earning her trophies at the Golden Globes and the Critics Choice awards. Starring opposite Paul Mescal, she plays Agnes, the wife of William Shakespeare, in the screen adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s bestselling novel, which follows the couple as they mourn the death of their young son.
Buckley is undoubtedly the film’s emotional heart. One scene in particular, in which Agnes lets out a shattering scream after realising her child has died, has left cinemagoers in floods of tears, mascara ruined. “She wails not only with her pain, but with her mother’s, and her mother’s mothers,” The Independent’s film critic Clarisse Loughrey wrote of Buckley’s big, heart-wrenching moment. “It’s through her we feel that quiet tether transcending all of human history.”
No wonder, then, the smart money is on her winning streak continuing all the way to the Oscars in March. And not bad for a woman who once had her performing skills ripped apart by Denise van Outen and John Barrowman on national television.
Buckley grew up in Killarney in County Kerry, the eldest of five children in a household “where music and writing and expressing yourself was really nurtured and respected”. Music, certainly, was in her DNA: her mother Marina is an opera singer and harpist turned vocal coach and music therapist, while her father Tim is a sometime singer and poet.
The family, nicknamed “the Von Trapps” by their neighbours, didn’t own a TV until she was in her teens. Instead, Jessie would stage her own productions, casting and directing her brother and three sisters. “She was constantly getting her siblings to dress up,” Marina told The Times. “We probably just saw it as children’s make-believe play, but I think that creativity was always there. Her imagination was always working.”
As a convent school pupil, she’d take on the male roles in the school musical, playing Tony in West Side Story, and later studied the piano, clarinet and harp at the Royal Irish Academy of Music in Dublin. Despite her clear talent and dedication, though, the teenage Jessie received a string of knockbacks when she started auditioning for drama schools in London.
It was one of these rejections that, in a roundabout way, proved the catalyst for her career. The day after receiving a “no” from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, the then 17-year-old learned of a casting call for I’d Do Anything, a new BBC reality TV show presided over by Andrew Lloyd Webber, which would document the search for the next Oliver and Nancy in a West End Oliver! revival. She headed to the South Bank to audition on a whim, and ended up being selected as one of a dozen potential Nancys.
Over the course of 10 weeks, Buckley was put through her musical theatre paces in front of the nation on a Saturday night, having everything from her posture to her acting skills picked apart by the judging panel. She was sent to train with the West End stars of Chicago to fix the former; judge John Barrowman criticised her as “awkward”. Eventually, she made it to the final before losing out to Jodie Prenger, an actor more than a decade her senior. “You’re not Nancy, but you’re an amazing star,” host Graham Norton told a shell-shocked Buckley.
Behind the scenes, Buckley had struggled with “messed-up” reality stardom at such a young age, she recently admitted in an interview with Vogue, where she likened her experience to a sort of “femininity school” that also involved “a lot of body shaming”. “I was growing into my body,” she told the magazine. “I was 17. I was in a moment of discovery. As women, it’s such unfair objectification.”
Perhaps that unease with her newfound fame explains why, when she was offered the chance to be Prenger’s understudy by theatre impresario Cameron Mackintosh, she turned it down. “I walked into his office, rang the bell and said, ‘Is Cameron Mackintosh here? Thank you, but I won’t be taking that job,’” she recalled. Lloyd Webber, meanwhile, has recently admitted he was “secretly pleased she didn’t win it”, as she might have ended up being typecast as a West End singer. “It was very obvious to me that she was much more than a musical theatre talent – or at least a very great one,” he said.
In a real about-turn from her primetime TV breakout, Buckley opted for a part in a low-key production of Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music, earning £300 each week and supplementing that with gigs as a jazz singer. Performing at the Ivy Club one night, in the sort of wish-fulfilment twist that only happens in fiction, a punter heard her voice and offered to cover her rent and tuition fees while she studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.
After graduating in 2013 (despite a brief suspension, when her teachers found out she was picking up singing gigs to earn extra money), she gravitated towards the stage once more, earning roles in high-profile productions of The Tempest and Henry V, in which she starred opposite Jude Law. On screen, she was cast in a series of BBC costume dramas, including a blockbuster adaptation of War and Peace, playing Princess Marya Bolkonskaya, the sister of James Norton’s dashing Prince Andrei.
It was very obvious to me that she was much more than a musical theatre talent
She and Norton soon struck up a relationship off-screen and were together for two years. Their romance, though, seemed to coincide with their careers stepping up a gear, with Norton’s role in McMafia sparking James Bond rumours and Buckley making her first forays into film with acclaimed performances in the psychological thriller Beast and the musical drama Wild Rose (which allowed her to showcase her singing voice once again, playing an aspiring country musician).
In 2018, she confirmed that they’d split up, admitting, with trademark candour, that the break-up had been tricky. “It was acrimonious, but it’s a tough job to have a relationship and he’s a great man, and we are great friends,” she told The Times, before hinting that distance and schedules may have played a part. “If you are away for a year filming, you are just not physically around at points,” she said.
Not long after, though, Buckley would find love when she was set up on a blind date with the Londoner Freddie Sorenson, courtesy of a mutual friend. Five years after their first stroll along Regent’s Canal, she and Sorenson, a TV producer turned mental health worker, got married at their 16th century home in Norfolk, in a low-key ceremony attended by just 40 guests, fuelled by mini Guinnesses and cheese toasties from their favourite Hackney café.
The couple welcomed their first child, a baby girl, last year. “I think while I was filming Hamnet, I deeply wanted to become a mother myself,” she told the New York Times. Now, she’s balancing the glamour of the awards circuit with “changing her nappy at 4am this morning”, as she told reporters at the Critics Choice Awards.
Though she joked at the start of her career that she would “usually get the kind of ‘girl who eats worms at school’ parts”, a glance at her resumé shows her remarkable versatility. Typecasting hasn’t been a problem for a star who has gone on to play a grieving Ukrainian widow in Chernobyl, a frustrated mother in The Lost Daughter (earning her first Oscar nomination in the process) and a swaggering but vulnerable Sally Bowles, decked out in a lime green fur coat, in the West End stage revival of Cabaret (for which she’d later win an Olivier award).
Her Cabaret co-star Eddie Redmayne is just one of her fellow performers who has waxed lyrical about her talent and her down-to-earth style. “Every actor that I know admires her so hugely,” Redmayne recently told Vogue. “She calls bulls***. She doesn’t suffer fools.” Her on-screen husband, Mescal, has said he would work with her “until the cows come home”. And Olivia Colman, with whom she has shared the screen in The Lost Daughter and Wicked Little Letters, has described their affinity, revealing that both “take our jobs seriously, [but] not necessarily ourselves”.
Maggie Gyllenhaal, who directed her in The Lost Daughter and in her next big movie The Bride!, has gone a step further, suggesting that, as a performer, “Jessie is able to hold the entire spectrum of human experience inside of her”. It might sound like actorly exaggeration, but anyone who has seen Buckley in her element would almost certainly agree.
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