Buckley, Jessie

actress; Oscar-nominated and Golden Globe-winning for Hamnet

“Hamnet” star Jessie Buckley looks for the shadowy bits of her characters

Andrea Cirla · Mar 28, 2026 · partial coverage

• Jessie Buckley
• *Hamnet*
• Chloé Zhao
• Maggie O'Farrell
• Agnes Hathaway
• grief
• motherhood
• dream analysis
• acting process
• *Cabaret*
• *I'd Do Anything*
• Shakespeare
• *The Bride*

Coverage note: full (about thirty minutes; YouTube auto-captions with some punctuation, mostly accurate, with a few garbled words and bracketed laughter)

Core ideas

Playing Agnes. Buckley says that before Maggie O'Farrell's novel, Shakespeare's wife was mostly written about unfavourably, as a woman who held back his genius. O'Farrell gave Agnes and the son Hamnet a full, vibrant presence beside Shakespeare. What drew Buckley was Agnes's "uncompromising embodiment" and connection to nature, which a society at the start of Puritanism and capitalism labelled witchcraft. She links this to her childhood in Killarney, where "things just grow because they want to grow". She did not plan the howling grief scene after Hamnet's death: Chloé Zhao asked everyone to be present, and the scene grew out of the bond formed with the young actor Jacobi Jupe and the rest of the cast. She became pregnant a week after the shoot ended, and says motherhood brought her "tenderness", a word she had not known she was seeking.

Shadowy bits and dreams. Buckley is "not scared to touch the shadowy bits" of characters; she chooses roles to meet them (the tough, disobedient, "too much" women, such as Marike in Women Talking), and says avoiding them makes them resurface more destructively. She works with a dream-analysis coach, whom she introduced to Zhao, because she finds linear thinking hard (she struggled at school) and prefers to enter a character's essence abstractly rather than project an idea onto her. She tells a dream about a girl trapped under a rock beneath the ocean while a stingray devours the sea, which she "put in the room" for the death scene, and mentions surrealists, Fellini's dream book and David Lynch. The story-as-vessel idea closes the Hamnet thread: Shakespeare reincarnates his son through a story.

Music, theatre, early career. Her mother is a harpist and singer; seeing her sing in church showed her the power of storytelling. She played Tony in West Side Story in her all-girls convent school. At seventeen she came to notice on the BBC talent show I'd Do Anything, where she says criticism was partly fair (she was raw) but partly "destructive", as when she was sent to a "femininity school" in Chicago to learn to walk in heels. Cameron Mackintosh then paid for a four-week Shakespeare course at RADA, which changed her life: she realised she could do in a word what she had needed music for. She discusses her Cabaret performance and the "Maybe This Time" ending, where she heard a woman who doubts that hope will arrive.

Motherhood and work. She shot The Bride (Maggie Gyllenhaal's Frankenstein story, opening after Hamnet) first, and its reshoots when eight months pregnant, filmed "from the boobs up". Since having her daughter she is "allergic to fake", sets boundaries on set, and feels the tug between work and motherhood; she does not think she has to choose, wants to show her daughter that you needn't lose any part of yourself.

Excerpts