Jessie Buckley gives a great acceptance speech, we learned at the 2026 Critics Choice Awards. Resplendant in Dior, the Irish actor, 36, accepted the award for best actress for her bravura performance in Hamnet. Along with heartfelt compliments for her director Chloe Zhao, she had some poetic words for her co-star Paul Mescal, 29.
“Paul, I bloody love you man,” Buckley said in her speech. “I know loads of other women do in this room too – but tough shit,” she added. “I could drink you like water working with you every single day. You’re a giant of the heart and thank you so much for making me a little bit more human.”
The co-stars clearly had a blast while filming Zhao’s lush and immersive take on Maggie O’Farrell’s book of the same name, imagining the interior world of William Shakespeare’s wife and their family. Buckley’s Agnes is a woman deeply rooted in nature with the gift of foresight, who desperately attempts to shield her three children from her visions of one of them not being at her deathbed.
Buckley gives a blistering performance as a 16th-century woman experiencing child birth and child loss. Being married to England’s greatest writer is the least interesting thing about her, although Mescal’s turn as the Bard is beautiful too. It’s climatic scene, which unpicks the subtext of grief running through Shakespeare’s tragedy Hamlet, has audiences ugly crying into their popcorn, something that’s attracted sniffy comments from the film bros that Hamnet, and by extension Buckley’s performance as the lead, is ‘Oscar bait’.
Yes, it’s a period drama (something else the Academy loves), and a worthy literary adaptation, and cathartic in its tragic-ness. But is it really emotional manipulation or is Buckley just that good? And don’t we all go to the cinema to feel something intensely human yet greater than ourselves?
The grumbling about Hamnet’s baitiness (and the more-than-slightly misogynist undertones of griping about a piece of art made by women about motherhood and marriage, art and grief with nary an explosion in sight) will only grow as Buckley is poised to take the top prizes. While nothing is a dead cert in the dark arts of Awards Season Predictions, getting the Critics Choice nod sets the Irish actor up well as we process through the Golden Globes (next week), the BAFTAs (mid-Feb), the Actors Awards (fka the SAG Awards, happening early March), finally arriving at the Academy Awards (mid-March, with nominations announced end of Jan).
Winning an Oscar for best actress would be long overdue cosmic recompence for a formative live-on-air loss — one brought on by the foolish voting British public. In 2008 aged just 18 and a complete unknown, Buckley entered a television talent show called I’d Do Anything, competing to be Nancy in a West End production of Oliver! It was overseen by producer Cameron Mackintosh with head judge Andrew Lloyd Webber and Graham Norton presenting.
Buckley blew the judges away and was the clear favourite of Mackintosh and Lloyd Webber — but lost the public vote in the final round to Jodie Prenger by just a few votes. Buckley was reportedly offered the role of Nancy’s understudy, which she politely declined, but the theatrical duo remained constantly supportive of her career and the ‘star quality’ they so clearly saw in her. Lloyd Webber offering tea and creative chats, and Mackintosh sending her to a Rada Shakespeare course.
I’d Do Anything turned into something of a surprise talent engine for the film industry, with Samantha Banks — eliminated in the penultimate week and placing third — going on to play Eponine in Tom Hooper’s starry musical movie version of Les Miserables. But initially, the aftermath of I’d Do Anything was fairly brutal for Buckley.
She’d already been suffering from depression when she entered in the first place, having taken time off school and being rejected by the Guildford School of Drama. “I was really sad. The adrenaline rush of being in that show got me through,” Buckley told the Radio Times. “But after the show finished, I really hit that low point again. I was in London, in a big city by myself, and still not well because I’d just put a plaster over it.”
Buckley stuck it out in London, working in a shop and as a club singer, and enrolled in a three-year course at Rada. Upon graduating aged 23, she was cast as Miranda in Shakespeare’s The Tempest at the Globe Theatre. The same historic playhouse where the climatic scene of Hamnet occurs, it just so happens. She was then cast in a clutch of high budget BBC shows such as War & Peace, and Taboo. The latter show also starred Oona Chaplin, also an Oscar contender for her captivating turn as an antagonist with a penchant for arson in Avatar: Fire and Ash.
In 2018, Buckley leaned into her musical talent to take the lead role in Wild Rose, where she played a Glaswegian ex-con following her dreams of becoming a singer. But having ticked the big boxes of Shakespeare, BBC and film star by 30, Buckley has gone on to select a fascinating array of projects.
There was her haunting turn in HBO’s Chernobyl as Lyudmilla Ignatenko, the wife of an irradiated firefighter who lost her husband and later her newborn to the fallout. The unamed Young Woman opposite Jesse Plimons in the slithering and surreal psychological Netflix horror I’m Thinking Of Ending Things.
She earned her first Acadamy Award nomination in 2022 for best supporting actress in The Lost Daughter, where she played a younger version of Olivia Coleman’s character in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s directoral debut. Coleman and Buckley re-united in 2023 for Wicked Little Letters, but not before Buckley took on another crop of dark and feminist roles including the protagonist of the Rory Kinnear-filled body horror Men, and a turn in Women Talking — a best picture-nominated drama centring on a group of Mennonite women confronting systematic drugging and rape in their isolated religious community.
We’ll be getting more Buckley brilliance later this year in Gyllenhaal’s sophomore film The Bride! (Frankenstein, but set in 1930s Chicago, and possibly a musical). For now she’s on the awards circuit, charming audiences while discussing another moment of her art and her life mirroring each other. Just days after filming on Hamnet wrapped, Buckley discovered she was pregnant with her first child — a desire she says that was unlocked by the process of playing Agnes.
Buckley married her partner, known only as Freddie, at a Guinness and cheese toastie-filled wedding in Norfolk in 2023. After a two-year relationship with her War & Peace co-star James Norton ending in a 2017 break-up that was, in Buckley’s own words, “acrimonious”, she’s kept her personal life very private. All we know is that he’s British and works in mental health, and they welcomed their daughter last year.
With Hamnet hitting UK and Irish cinemas later this week, non-US audiences will (finally) get to appreciate Buckley’s performance. Regardless of whether she sweeps, it’s a must-watch film. But Buckley winning big this awards season would also be history-making. An Irish actor has never yet won the Oscar for best actress (Saoirse Ronan has had four nominations, and Ruth Negga one). Lloyd Webber said it first: Buckley has the “sacred flame of star quality”.
Hamnet is in cinemas from 9 January 2026.
