Jessie Buckley’s favourite song: “You think about the things that you’ve left behind”
Very few Oscar winners have had their big breaks starting out on TV talent shows; a quick search shows possibly Jennifer Hudson, and that’s about it. But after winning a Golden Globe for her performance in Hamnet, Jessie Buckley may well end up being the next name on the list come March.
Almost 18 years ago, Irish actor and singer Buckley started off on the BBC show I’d Do Anything, one of those Saturday night jobs usually presented by Graham Norton in which casting directors for musicals get to put their feet up and let the public do their job for them and pick the next big thing. Buckley didn’t win it, but she got to the final, and that was enough to get her a few parts in fairly major theatre productions alongside other talents like Ted Lasso’s Hannah Waddingham.
After a stint at RADA and some Shakespeare on stage opposite Jude Law, Buckley landed a role in a TV adaptation of War and Peace before making a film debut in a low-budget psychological thriller called Beast, which brought her acclaim for her performance. Next up, she blended acting with music in 2018’s Wild Rose, a country music movie with a darker edge starring Julie Walters.
It allowed Buckley to show off her musical talents, and she would appear not only at Glastonbury performing songs from the film but also in other very different scenarios. One of the songs she would sing was Nina Simone’s cover of Sandy Denny’s ‘Who Knows Where the Time Goes’.
She told the New York Times: “I did some gigs in a working male prison for lifers, and I sang this song… there’s beautiful things in that song that kind of make you think about the things that you’ve left behind and how long you’ve got left.”
In just a few short years, Buckley would go on to forge a stellar career in musical roles on the big screen, including in the Oscar-winning Judy Garland biopic Judy, plus she recorded her own material, not least with former Suede guitarist Bernard Butler on their 2022 collaboration album For All Our Days That Tear the Heart.
On Simone, she added: “When I hear her sing anything, I just think she contains multitudes …like the epicness of being a queen and the fragility of being a human, and every song that she sings, it always shatters me and makes me want to climb a mountain.”
Buckley is next going to be seen in The Bride!, a film directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal, who cast Buckley in her directorial debut, The Lost Daughter, opposite Olivia Colman. The Bride! is a horror romance that updates the story of the Bride of Frankenstein and is due out on March 6th.
Buckley is now hotly tipped to follow her Golden Globe win with an Oscar for Hamnet, the film she stars in with Paul Mescal and dramatises the life of William Shakespeare and his wife, Agnes Hathaway, as they attempt to deal with the death of their 11-year-old son. The film was also a winner at this month’s Golden Globes, collecting ‘Best Motion Picture – Drama’ for Chinese director Chloe Zhao, who previously won an Oscar for ‘Best Film’ thanks to 2020’s Nomadland starring Frances McDormand.
