Jessie Buckley is about to walk into the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles as the most heavily favored Best Actress nominee in years.
Prediction markets give her a 97.8% chance of winning an Oscar tonight for her performance as Agnes Shakespeare in Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet.
She has already won the Golden Globe, the BAFTA, the Critics Choice Award, and the Actor Award, every major precursor in the category.
She is the only acting nominee this awards season to collect all four. If she wins tonight she will become the first Irish woman ever to win the Academy Award for Best Actress, and only the third Irish woman ever nominated in that category after Saoirse Ronan and Ruth Negga.
The remarkable thing is that the performance is entirely worthy of all of it. The remarkable other thing is that her story is extraordinary well before you get to the part about the Oscars.
Who Is Jessie Buckley?
Jessie Buckley was born on December 28, 1989, in Killarney, County Kerry, in the southwest of Ireland.
She is the eldest of five children in a family that has been compared to an Irish Von Trapp, raised in a home with no television, with a father who writes poetry and a mother, Marina Cassidy, who is a trained classical harpist and soprano.
Creative life in this family was not an aspiration. It was simply the atmosphere.
She is the great-granddaughter of Irish republican Madge Clifford, a lineage, as one writer noted, that speaks to generations of women who refused to be a historical footnote.
This weekend, at the foot of Mangerton Mountain near her childhood home, every street post and shop window is displaying her image.
In Killarney, the school she attended as a child has built a timeline of her life for its pupils.
Her teacher Padraig O’Sullivan told The Irish Times: “Jessie is a massive role model for all the kids. Lots of them are in drama school now.”
How She Started And How It Nearly Broke Her
Buckley’s entry into public life was through one of the more brutal mechanisms British television has devised.
In 2008, at 17 years old, she appeared as a contestant on I’d Do Anything, the BBC reality competition created by Andrew Lloyd Webber to find an unknown performer to play Nancy in a West End revival of Oliver!.
She made it to the final and was reportedly Lloyd Webber’s favorite.
She lost.
What she experienced on the show has stayed with her. Male choreographers told her she was not ladylike enough in her movements.
She was sent to what the show called “femininity school.” Judges made jokes about her appearance on camera.
“I really hope that a 15, 17, whatever-age woman never has to be brutalised quite like what happened on that show,” she told Vogue. “But I didn’t recognise it fully at the time. I just felt it, which was difficult.”
She did not take the offer to understudy the winner. Instead, a Shakespeare workshop facilitated by Sir Cameron Mackintosh changed her direction entirely.
She enrolled at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art for three years. She made her West End debut in Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music.
She worked alongside Jude Law and Kenneth Branagh. She learned her craft the slow, difficult way.
The Career She Built
Buckley made her film debut in the psychological thriller Beast in 2017 and won the British Independent Film Award for Most Promising Newcomer. The following year she delivered a BAFTA-nominated performance as an aspiring country singer and single mother in Wild Rose.
Wild Rose is the film that established her as someone capable of carrying a movie on her own terms.
She played Lyudmila Ignatenko in HBO’s Chernobyl in 2019, Maren in Charlie Kaufman’s I’m Thinking of Ending Things in 2020, and a memorable supporting role in Fargo Season 4.
Her first Oscar nomination came in 2022 for Best Supporting Actress, playing the young version of Olivia Colman’s character in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Lost Daughter.
The performance was widely praised.
On stage, she won the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actress in a Musical for playing Sally Bowles in the 2021 West End revival of Cabaret.
She is, in the truest sense, the complete performer, film, television, stage, comedy, drama, horror, and historical, capable of all of it at the highest level.
Rolling Stone’s David Fear wrote that people “will be talking about Jessie Buckley’s performance for years.”
The New York Post’s Johnny Oleksinski wrote that Buckley in Hamnet is “giving one of those rare turns that simply beggars belief. She swings back and forth from cast iron to porcelain. The actress is thunderous, playful, grounded and ethereal.”
What Does Jessie Buckley Do In Hamnet?
Hamnet is Chloé Zhao’s adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel, which reimagines the life of Agnes, the woman history calls Anne Hathaway, who was the wife of William Shakespeare and the mother of his children, including the son whose death at age eleven from plague would haunt everything her husband subsequently wrote.
Paul Mescal plays Shakespeare. The film places Agnes at the center of a story that history has always framed around her husband.
Buckley plays Agnes as a creature of nature, barely contained, deeply instinctive, existing in a relationship with the physical world that her husband, a man of language and mind, can observe but never fully enter.
Zhao described the process of working with her in terms that capture something unusual about the collaboration.
“In the morning, she would do fever writing about her dreams and then would pick some music, and as soon as I got to set, I would put the music on repeat so the whole set was harmonized to the vibration she wanted,” Zhao said.
When Buckley produced a guttural scream of grief in the scene of Hamnet’s death, it was unplanned. “That was not planned,” Zhao said. “But I believe it didn’t just come from her; it came from the collective.”
To prepare for the hardest scenes, Buckley swam each morning in the freezing waters of Hampstead Heath, letting nature reset her before facing the cameras.
She has spoken about her deep connection to the land, returning to Kerry to climb mountains near her childhood home as a form of therapeutic recharge, and how that same Irishness informs her approach to Agnes, a woman who finds solace in the physical world when everything around her disintegrates.
She described the difference between shooting Hamnet and The Bride!, the Frankenstein film she completed immediately before:
“The Bride! is like having your hands in an electrical current, that’s got petrol running through it, and you’re just soaring on acid. You’re just in another stratosphere of life. And then Hamnet’s like putting your hands into clay and Earth.”
What A Win Would Mean For Buckley
When Buckley won the Actor Award for Best Actress earlier this month, she became the first Irish performer ever to win in that category.
If she wins the Oscar tonight she will be the first Irish woman ever to win Best Actress at the Academy Awards, a prize that has never had an Irish winner in its entire history.
In her Actor Awards acceptance speech, she dedicated a significant portion of her remarks to Emily Watson, her co-star in Hamnet and an actress who has been a formative influence on her.
She pointed to Watson in the audience and said, “I’d like to say a special thank you to my incredible friend and date tonight, Emily Watson. Breaking the Waves made me say to myself, ‘That’s what I want to do.’ The best advice that you always give to me is to always go back to the well of just being human. Ground zero, babe. You’re the realest of the real.”
For the kids in Killarney and across Ireland watching tonight, that is the real weight of what is at stake.
Not a gold statue but the confirmation that it is possible, that a girl from Kerry who grew up without a television, who was body-shamed on a reality show at seventeen, who turned down the understudy and went to drama school instead and built her career one uncompromising role at a time, can walk to the podium at the Dolby Theatre and hold the Oscar for Best Actress.
The ceremony begins tonight at 7 p.m. ET on ABC and Hulu.
