Extended interview: Jessie Buckley

On Hamnet, the New York Times says, Buckley's performance of loss seems to draw from some dark place where every parent's worst nightmare has pooled.

Her scream is both unfathomable and instantly recognisable.

What do you make of that description?

I think the idea of losing a child is unfathomable.

I hope I, like, touched the edges of what that truth might be.

But, you know, I don't have any idea where grief begins and where it stops.

And I guess when I get an opportunity to imagine and experience what it might be, I just always want to, with absolute respect, go wherever my heart is.

And my body and my imagination is brave enough to go.

But accessing that emotion is something different.

I think it is.

I mean, I think the more I do this job, the more I realise that I have to get more human in every aspect, not just in work, in myself.

Get more curious.

Making Hamnet and working with Chloe and with Paul was so, like, porous in a way and allowed me to go to a place and a deeper place than I probably have gone before, which I can't articulate why or how or what that is, like, in a tangible way.

But what helped facilitate doing that was Chloe's only really interested in absolute presence and humanity.

When filming's, like, when it's hard work is when you're on your own in a trailer with your own head and you just are, like, have to all of a sudden leap to being, like, titanically emotional out of nowhere, that's really hard.

But when you have a leader and colleagues and collaborators and somebody who's actually creating a world and asking you as an artist to keep filling the tank to be creating within that world, it's so much easier to go somewhere.

Tell me about the chemistry between you and Paul Meskell.

We knew each other a little bit before, just from being Irish, but we didn't, like, know each other like we do now.

And I absolutely adore that man.

I think he is a gigantic human.

We were in New York at the same time before we shot Hamnet, and we were just kind of getting to know each other and probably, you know, figuring each other out.

Did you have a preconceived sense of who Paul Meskell was?

I actually didn't.

I mean, I really respected his work.

I think, and I see this in him now, I think he is genuinely somebody who can hold what it is to be a movie star.

Not many people can.

And it's because he has this giant capacity and it's also it's not just being a movie star because beside this giant, he's also incredibly human, like has been one of the most significant, important, like collaborators and male leads I've worked with.

His capacity to be there for you, but also with you and challenge you is ginormous.

And from our very first chemistry read.

A chemistry read is to make sure you have chemistry?

Yeah.

I mean, it would be really, like, depressing if I didn't, wouldn't it?

I'd be like the only woman, it would be the only woman in the world who failed to find chemistry with Paul Meskell.

You felt it right away.

I felt, well, even if you, like, respect and admire somebody or think somebody is attractive, chemistry is a different thing.

It's kinetic.

It's like, it is energy, you know, it's vibrations.

And we knew each other.

But what happened in this read was something that I felt so, there was something unknowable about him.

There was something unknowable about us.

There was, like, this crackle of potential, which felt like, you know, that's always the most exciting place to meet somebody.

Because then when you're on set, you know it's just going to be alive.

You know you're never going to do the same take twice.

I was wondering about that in these really intense parts of the film or any of the films you do.

Do you, you must do multiple takes.

Yeah.

Can you achieve that intensity over and over and over again?

No.

Are you better at the first take, the second, third, fourth?

It doesn't really, there's no, like, routine with that.

You know, sometimes, sometimes you arrive and you can just feel this is cooked.

And you're trying to, like, kind of hold that space until they say action and then let the greyhounds run.

And I also trust the director as well.

Like, sometimes, like, with Chloe on this, sometimes she would do one take, one set up, one shot.

And that can be a little bit unnerving.

Sometimes you're like, you sure?

But her instincts are so connected and grounded and I trust her, like, implicitly.

And then sometimes, like, for example, at the end of the film, you had 10 days to shoot this.

It was the end of having shot everything.

We'd gone on this, like, epic journey of the heart.

And then we had to go to the globe.

We had to, like, come, you know, bring all the bits of this story together in some way.

And I was completely lost for, like, four days.

I just didn't know how to, like, where to go.

Explain this.

So you're shooting these scenes at the Globe Theatre toward the end and you're thinking, what, as an actor?

I'm thinking, I don't know how to meet this moment where I have to kind of channel the story of a mother who's lost their child and meet Hamlet, you know, meet a kind of another vessel of my son.

And for Agnes, she doesn't ever leave her hometown.

Now she's in London in, like, a theatre.

Her husband has stolen her dead son's name.

For what?

You know, and actually being lost as an actor was exactly what I needed to be as a character.

And sometimes that feeling is so uncomfortable, you almost get scared of it and you want to hide it.

And then I realised this is exactly what I need to let be seen.

And I just have to be lost.

And you kind of, you don't often see something lost on screen like that because your ego comes in and you want to, like, yeah, I know what I'm doing.

Yeah, I've got this.

Don't worry, Chloe.

I know it's the end of the film.

I know exactly what I'm doing.

But I was coming to Chloe going, I don't think we've, I don't know where I'm going.

I don't know what's happening.

And Chloe, the director was saying?

She was feeling the same.

You know, she'd also gone on an epic journey of her heart.

She'd completely given herself over to the story.

And, you know, the globe theatre, cinema, storytelling, they're very, very potent ancient spaces.

They ask a lot of you as an audience member, as players, as storytellers, as the story itself.

It's asking you to surrender.

It's like somebody has reached into your heart and woken up a bit of you that you didn't know you were coming here to feel that day.

Do you get something out of these roles?

Does something stay with you?

Oh, everything stays with me.

I think all the parts stay with me.

There's no way of dislodging myself from what I've come to understand by living within these women.

They've become my lighthouse.

They've become my education.

The bits of them all have created who I am.

And I don't ever let them go.

What do you see in these women that you play?

Is there a through line?

Is there a connection?

They're all women who want, they want to live something more than maybe they're allowed.

Or every time I get an opportunity to live through one of these women, I feel like I grow within my space as a woman because of what I've understood from them and what I've been able to incubate through them.

And the shadows of what they are has, I don't know, it's helped me let go of the things that don't serve me as a woman.

Because I've come to understand it through them because I've come to understand it through them in a way.

Like what?

Like rage.

Do you have rage?

We all have rage.

We all have rage.

There's a hunger, a desire, a mind, a body, hope, an education, like the brilliance of what women can be if they're given a space to live fully within it.

And I think, you know, Agnes was such a force because she was so uncompromising and uncompromising of herself in a world that maybe was too fearful of her too muchness.

I think that's what these women have allowed me to be, is to allow what is deemed too much be full and alive.

Do you feel that too muchness is inside you?

I think that's the thing that I'm trying to unravel because I don't think there is any.

There is too much.

It's about being alive.

And there's a lot of life within women and that I, and of women that I know in my life and of these characters that doesn't get to fully be recognised or be given the truth that it deserves.

Like in Lost Daughter, you know, it's about a woman and a mother who is hungry for her mind, is also a mother, loves her children.

And the complex thought and the truth of what that thought is, is that being a mother isn't just being like the Madonna, you know?

It's not all kind of, how can you want more and it be not judged?

You've said you like playing the unappealing woman.

That appeals to you.

I like playing the honest woman, like the complexity of what it is to be a woman.

And to be a human, I wouldn't know what to do with the idea of what is appealing.

I wouldn't know what to do with that.

I think I wouldn't be even able to play that because my filter is far too thin.

And I'd probably explode the facade of it if it was on me for like more than two minutes.

I want the truth. I want something that's full-bodied and bold and alive and connected and can contain the biggest parts of what it is to be a human in the world and meet relationships within that, you know?

Are you exhausted when you play these parts?

Is it physically draining?

No, no, no.

Really?

No, not at all.

It's like completely invigorating.

It's like kind of massaging out the knots, you know?

And when you come to understand the knots, they give you catharsis.

You get relief.

You get bigger connections, you know?

You look for bigger connections in your life.

You look for the truth.

And the things that are tiring is when you're not being honest with yourself, you know?

When you are wearing a shell and all these women help me to crack something through.

They crack the curse for me.

What's the curse for you?

That's interesting.

The curse for me is the projected idea of what it is to be a woman, what it is to be a human in the world.

It has never been my experience from being alive.

It's way more messier than that.

It's way more complex than that.

And I think when you get down into the messy truth of what it is to be a human being, that's when there's life.

And that's when there's new, something new can come through in that.

I went to a screening at 7.30 this morning of The Bride.

Did you have coffee beforehand?

It was quite a movie to see in the morning.

Quite a movie to see, period.

But at 7.30 in the morning.

You go to so many different places in that role.

Sometimes not just in one scene, but in one sentence.

I remember when I read it first, it was like being plugged into an electrical socket.

It was like reading like Sanskrit or something, you know.

It was a whole new language.

But the feeling I got in my body was like, I just felt pulsating, like prilled, terrified.

Had no idea how to go about even starting this.

And then you just start, you know.

I don't have a process.

I follow my nose.

I like, I just am, you know, I'm reacting to where my imagination wants me to sniff down.

But where do you find that?

Where does it come from?

Where do I find the pieces?

Images.

I start gathering images of who do I think is a texture of Mary Shelley, who is a texture of Ida, who's a texture of the bride.

Working with a movement coach for like weeks to like find something that was singular to Mary Shelley and something that was singular to the bride and something singular to Ida.

Dialect coach, you know, moving, finding a voice that felt like Mary Shelley, a texture of her and, you know, and then it becomes a collage and it becomes a dance and it becomes something.

You know, what you want by the time you get to set is I don't want I want to take my hands off the steering wheel and I just want to go on a roller coaster.

I don't want to be anywhere.

I don't want to be thinking about anything.

I stay, I stayed in the accent for, in the bride's accent for all the time and then.

But can you come off set if I'm there and talk to me normally?

No.

Yeah, but as them.

In that one I just, in that one I stayed in, once we were up and shooting, I just stayed.

When I was working in the accent all day.

You say that accent, but it's multiple accents.

It's multiple accents in the same sentence sometimes.

Yeah, I don't know.

You just get it as, you know, into you as much as you can and then it's great fun.

And the movement, the being possessed, the moving from different parts of your body.

I want to live in an unconscious place when I work.

So over the months that I prep on anything, I'm taking everything as ingredients, as food.

I'm taking my dreams.

I'm taking things that I see on the street.

You know, I've walked behind people on streets with my camera looking at how they walk.

Wow, that's interesting.

Are you always taking from regular life like that?

Modeling characters on people that you see or ways people act or hold themselves?

Not always.

Like, well, like with Fargo, I remember when I was playing Orietta Mayflower, there was something instinctively to me very birdy about her.

Birdy?

Like a little bird.

Like she was like a little bird.

How is it for you, you do these very different accents to the point that when you speak as you, as Jess, you're like, oh yeah, she's Irish.

How challenging is it to do the different accents?

There's always a process.

You know, you start and you really hate yourself because you sound nothing like the thing you want to.

But it's, you've got, it's like a muscle.

It's like, for me, it's like music.

You know, you become, you come to learn the rhythms.

You come to learn the tonality.

Like when I was doing Bride, my warm-up would be Allen Ginsberg's Howl.

There was something about the like rhythm of that piece of incredible literature, which felt, oh, that's a really good key into finding the Bride and Ida's accent.

And Barbara Stanwyck was also somebody that I listened to as like a 1950s talky, quick-witted.

You're looking for like, yeah, what's going to, what's going to give you a texture of what that character might be like.

Maggie Gyllenhaal referred to you as kind of a wild animal.

Good.

What do you make of that?

I'm happy to be called a wild animal.

She wants me to be.

Do you think there's a truth to that?

Or do you see what she meant by that?

Yeah, I have a lot of life in me.

Maybe I am now, maybe more so now, yeah.

Now after?

After getting to live through all these brilliant women.

Do you feel you're becoming a different person fundamentally?

I think I'm becoming more like myself.

What sort of chemistry was there with Christian Bale?

I mean, that was like wild petrel.

He is another giant.

It was incredibly alive and fierce and intense.

And, you know, he goes there too, like.

He goes there too, meaning goes where you go.

Yeah.

In what way?

We all know that from seeing his work.

He's going to go wherever that asks him to go.

And it was thrilling.

It was, you know, when you get to work with somebody who's equally as muscular and provocative and intense as I am, you're like, okay, it's fun to go to work.

That movie, that film, The Bride, there are times that you laugh and there are times that are very emotional, love story.

Times that you're squeamish.

And then there are times you're like, what is going on?

No, it's, it's punk.

It's proper punk.

It's, I am, I feel very proud of it.

I feel it's so rare nowadays that you get a script, a set, an actor, a language, a character that is as bold.

And as, I really think Maggie has a language that is very new.

You know, she's, she's messing with form.

She's messing with what's possible, especially for women.

You know, like, I don't know if I've ever read anything that is as broad a landscape of, of a female character like that before.

And if someone's going to send me that, I'm like, yeah, I'm definitely going to do that.

You know, this is punk.

It's, it's about something new coming through.

And especially within a studio, you know, system.

Um, it's very rare, it's too rare that a female director gets to play in that sandpit and that we together get to, you know, crack the ceiling a little bit.

You watch you on screen and there is this raw, fierce intensity that you don't see just walking through the door.

It depends.

We've only met each other for like half an hour or so.

I, I feel, I feel raw.

I definitely feel raw after having had a child, you know, and in a really refreshing way.

How so?

Because it feels alive, you know, you cut the bullshit.

You like become more honest and you become more focused about what's important.

How has motherhood refocused you?

I mean, my heart is like cracked open in a way that I, you can't even really know until you've experienced what that is.

I think before I would have probably been scared of how vulnerable that is.

And now I want that humanity and the strength and vulnerability of being a mother and, uh, and loving like that and the human and how human that is.

I, I, I just want it to be seen.

I don't want to wear any mask ever.

I want, I want more life.

You know, I, I, I feel like.

I feel a little bit scared of myself.

Be kind of honest.

You feel scared or you feel scared of yourself?

I feel scared of myself.

What do you explain that?

You know, it's just very exciting.

It's thrilling.

It's like, whoa, there's like a whole other, whole other world now.

Becoming a mother wakes you up to awe again.

It wakes you up to life.

You know, it's a new thing.

She's a new thing.

I'm a new thing.

Your perspective of the world is a new thing.

Your relationship is new.

Everything's new.

And, and you get reminded of how fragile and strong life is.

And, um, it just makes me want to live.

You had an artistic kind of upbringing itself.

Yeah, we had a, there was a lot of value put on expression and experience.

Music was important growing up.

Oh, hugely important.

Yeah.

You play the harp.

I play the harp.

The piano.

Piano.

You sing.

I sing.

Do you still do all these things?

I still sing.

And I still write, write music.

My kind of dirty little secret in between jobs is I like making things.

I like going and being part of making things with musicians.

You are just creative on all these different levels.

I love, I love creating things.

I love, I love being an artist.

I love being part of a community of artists.

Being part of this community has like gone beyond my wildest expectations and imagination of what is possible.

Um, I never, I never knew it could feel like this.

Describe that, explain that.

You know, when you start out, when you're a kid and you start dreaming about being in the theatre or like experiencing theatre for the first time, I must have been about seven.

And that is when you, did you recognize at the time that theatre was?

I saw magic.

I saw the magic of like storytelling and how, how real it can make you feel.

How like it can send you somewhere else, but it can feel like so total, even though it's, you know, magic.

Was film, were movies in your mind?

Oh, I mean, I never in a, on a million years thought I'd make a film.

Because?

I didn't have a TV till I was 15.

Like we just, we didn't have a TV.

And, and it was exotic.

Like it was in Hollywood, you know, it was like, it wasn't in Kerry.

Like that's, I don't even know how you would get there.

Like, how do you get over there?

Why did you go to London as a teenager?

I had taken a year out of school.

And.

Because?

I was not, I had depression and I wasn't very well.

And so I wasn't ready to go to university.

And I didn't, I was a bit lost.

I didn't know.

Were you talking with your parents about this at the time?

Were they?

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And, and why did London become a thought in, okay, this is a way to deal with this?

Well, I wanted to go and study musical theatre.

And I came over to London in that year off to audition and try and get into one of these theatre schools.

And I didn't get in.

After I didn't get in, I, there was an open audition for a TV show called I Do Anything, which was a reality TV show looking for somebody to play Nancy in the West End in Oliver Twist.

And it was Andrew Lloyd Webber and Cameron McIntosh.

And I just joined the queue to practice for my next musical theatre school audition, not thinking anything of it.

You knew you were auditioning to be on I Do Anything.

I knew I was doing that, but like, I, I just thought I'd go and practice.

I didn't think it would go anywhere.

You auditioned without thinking you'd actually make it on the show.

Yeah.

I've watched the clips.

A lot happens in that show.

There are ups and downs and you're, they love you at one moment and they say you, they don't and you are excited and then devastated.

It seemed like a roller coaster I'd do anything.

You know, I had just raw passion.

I couldn't believe my luck.

I mean, you know, this was something that I had dreamt about and I was getting an opportunity to do it and like be a professional, you know, potentially get a role in the West End, be part of this community.

I was so raw and I was, I was so young, you know, I was 17.

I had no, I was so ignorant and innocent to what business, the business was.

I was, I look at that and there, I think you are a brave girl.

There's no way I would do that now.

There's no hope in hell I would do that now.

But I think the kind of raw passion and ignorance to just want to be part of this world was, what kind of burnt through me at that moment.

You didn't get into two drama schools?

Yeah.

You applied and they said, no talent?

No.

Have you gone back to see them since?

No.

No, that's okay.

I probably wasn't ready.

I, I wasn't meant to do musical theater.

There are wise.

I just wasn't ready.

I needed to get to know myself and I didn't go back to study for another three years and I did lots of things in that time.

You know, I sang in, as a jazz singer in clubs where nobody listened to me and I worked in charity shops and I sold cereal in markets and, um, you know, I was in London.

I could be anything I wanted to be.

Because you've mentioned depression, I wonder what you were thinking, what, how much you were processing, what was going on.

You presumably have moved past it.

Your experience might be helpful.

You know, this journey of, of finding a way to incubate the shadows in the women that I play comes from a, from that moment in my life because there was so many of the feelings that I had and I had a lot of feeling and I had a lot of life and I wanted a lot from life and I was really hungry for it and I felt like there was no place for that when I was 15 and I think that's when it imploded in on me and when I got sick and, and lost myself,

you know, felt like the weight, I couldn't, I couldn't crack the ceiling.

How did you deal with it?

I got help.

I got therapy quite early on, um, singing.

I mean, I, I honestly think it's kind of saved me.

Expression has saved me.

Something wasn't alive then, let's just say, as a, like it is now.