Cover Story: ‘Hamnet’s Jessie Buckley On Love, Her Process, Her Past And Her Connection With Co-Star Paul Mescal: “He Held Me”

“Where have you been?” shouts Jessie Buckley.

Laughing, arms thrown wide for a hug, she strides across the lobby of a North Hollywood theater to embrace a young woman staffing tonight’s event. We’re gathered for a post-screening Hamnet Q&A and as Buckley greets everyone, it’s clear she’s collected a lot of friends on the long road to this moment. Jet-lagged, fresh from the Oscar Nominees Luncheon, then a dinner, not to mention our cover shoot and interview the day before, she is all energy and enthusiasm.

In the theater’s green room, she talks excitedly about taking the ‘class photo’ with her fellow Academy nominees earlier that day, and in particular Guillermo del Toro’s infectious delight. Is she exhausted? No, she’s fine, she says. As a new mother, this kind of tiredness doesn’t bother her. She’s having a great time.

A few minutes later, as the Hamnet credits roll and the final bars of Max Richter’s “On the Nature of Daylight” fade out, I walk on stage to introduce her and am met with a 600-seat theater packed with people who look like they’ve been slapped. This is a good thing, mind you. There are loud sniffs and some sobs. But then, the moment Buckley walks on, the entire audience leaps to its feet, roaring and clapping for her.

That wave of emotion from the crowd reminds me then of something Buckley told me months ago: “When we go to the cinema, or we go to the theater, we listen to a story, we’re holding our unspoken feelings beside each other… That’s the great mystery of why stories are important and needed in culture.”

So far, Buckley’s Hamnet performance has earned a Lead Actress Oscar nomination, plus BAFTA and Actor Award nominations. She’s already won at the Critics Choice and the Globes. During her acceptance speech for the former, she called out to her co-star Paul Mescal in the audience, “I could drink you like water!” And at the latter, she took the time to thank a Hamnet crew member who made a particularly delicious soup on set. Such is Jessie Buckley — a woman whom I will come to learn, says and does only what feels real.

THE DAY BEFORE

Post-shoot, Buckley and I sit and talk in the Deadline office. She been stocking up on her favorite U.S. protein bar (it’s called Perfect Bar, by the way) and whips one out of her pocket, insisting I have it. (It is indeed very good). So, we snack and we chat. She tells me a story of being 22, and her U.K. agent Lindy King, “an incredible woman,” asking if she’d like to go to the U.S. to explore her options. But, instead of feeling she should go, Buckley knew her own mind enough to say no. It just wasn’t the right time.

 “I said, ‘No, I’m not ready. I don’t think so.’ And I wasn’t ready, but I love that I said that. I needed more time to know myself. And I think I was scared. It’s intimidating. And it felt so foreign and exotic and far away at that time. So, I needed time to learn, and I did,” she says.

I’d rubbed nuclear fake tan on myself… I’d just come from doing musicals and she was like, ‘Look, I really am a musical theater person, and I can introduce you to people, but what do you want to do?’ And I was like, ‘No, I want to be Judi Dench.’”

Part of that learning involved watching Judi Dench on the stage. And in fact, Dench provided inspiration even earlier than that. Buckley recalls being 17 and her very first meeting with King, who had spotted Buckley on BBC reality show I’d Do Anything, in which contestants competed to star as Nancy in a West-end production of the musical Oliver! Buckley came second. “Lindy looked after very fancy people,” Buckley says. “Keira Knightley and Olivia Colman, and Tom Hardy. Anyway, she asked me to come into the office, and I had been in Kerry [in Ireland] that weekend. At the time, to be professional in the world — I did anyway — we all wore horrendous nuclear fake tan. I got on a flight from Kerry. We’d been on a summer holiday as family in our caravan, and I’d rubbed nuclear fake tan on myself. I had on a red and white polka-dot dress, a white cardigan that was turning yellow as the flight went on, and little cork heels, huge white hoop earrings. I’d just come from doing musicals and she was like, ‘Look, I really am a musical theater person, and I can introduce you to people, but what do you want to do?’ And I was like, ‘No, I want to be Judi Dench.’”

But first, Buckley put a stop to everything and went back to college. “I did have a sense of myself, and I had the confidence to go, no, this is what I need to do. I need to go back to college for three years. I want to do that. I want to read plays. I want to watch films. I want to mess up in private. I want to go to the pub on a Friday night and be my own age. I had a career. I was already working, and then I just was like, ‘Goodbye.’ And it wasn’t even a thought, that was just what I knew I wanted to do.”

I’d love to do a new musical. I think about the sound of London. And get Radiohead to do the music. But they’re far too cool.

At that time, Buckley was already a well-regarded singer. She now has two hit albums — one is the soundtrack to Wild Rose, her 2018 breakout film in which she plays a down-on-her-luck Country singer who happens to be Scottish; the other, her collaboration with Bernard Butler titled For All Our Days That Tear the Heart was nominated for a Mercury Prize. Music is, she says, “still a massive part of my life.” Growing up, she played the harp, saxophone, piano and more, although, she says, “I don’t have any skills in that department anymore.” When pressed, she admits she can still play the piano piece from the film The Pianist: “Every now and then I pull it out.”

Singing is her musical mainstay now. “I love singing. What’s fun is in between jobs, I go to my dirty secret basement and write, and I have no need, apart from to feel free in it. Whether I’ve done it in a small club in Camden, or I’ve done Cabaret in the West End, it’s so part of me. And I’d love to marry that with cinema. It would be such a nice thing to have done in my life.” The musical she’d love to make? “I’d love to do a new musical. I think about the sound of London. And get Radiohead to do the music. But they’re far too cool.”

That first early experience of fame in I’d Do Anything, came up a while back in a Vogue interview. Buckley had told them she experienced “a lot of body shaming and bringing me to femininity school” and “unfair objectification.” She wants to clarify that now though, she says, and tells me, “The part of performing and being allowed to peek behind the curtain was utter joy. I could not believe it. And there were a lot of people there that were very supportive and encouraging of that… I was also a young woman who was really discovering herself on what she wanted to say and how she would express that, not just with stories and singing, but with her body. And I wasn’t fully formed in myself. How could you be? I think we’re so hard on women, especially young women too. The bits that were difficult was the idea of what a woman should be, when they’re really just learning to discover themselves. They’re the hard bits of it for me, not the performing.”

I ask how she feels now as an actor. Surely some feel entitled to objectify her and pass comment on how she should be? She laughs. “Obviously, they haven’t done very well. I just do it my own way.”

BUILDING HAMNET

Buckley hadn’t read Maggie O’Farrell’s book Hamnet when she first met writer-director Chloé Zhao. “I was at Telluride Film Festival,” she says. “I was there with Women Talking and they do another class photograph there. We were there doing this photograph and all of a sudden I saw Chloé [waving]. And I was like, “Me? What?” And she came bounding over to me.”

They sat down for breakfast a week later. “I still didn’t know about Hamnet and we talked about motherhood and death and we were just talking around the subject. Then when I left, my agent said, ‘It’s actually in relation to this book called Hamnet.’ I got the book and read it in one night. I couldn’t go to sleep until I finished it. And that was kind of it. The rest was about creating it together.”

She says of Zhao, “I’ve always admired Chloé in so many ways, not just for her extraordinary films that she has made that really, really took my breath away. And when you see them, you’re like, ‘This is so singular. This is such a singular expression that has come from deep inside somebody’s soul.’ And I saw that, but I also saw her in the world as a woman. And I have such a clear picture of her at the Oscars the year she won [for Nomadland] and she had those white trainers on, and this dress and this face that was just very present.”

Later, Zhao visited Buckley’s home in the English countryside, which happens to be a 15^th-century house — very Shakespeare-appropriate. “That house really helps me for every job,” Buckley says, “because I go back to something very simple. Even at the moment, when I go back, I’m ground zero. I have tracksuit pants that are eaten by moths to within an inch of their life. I have a bath that’s old. I light fires. We don’t have a TV. I cook. I just do the simplest things and I need to step off. I need to step out. I’m not method. I definitely like to very gently stir the soup… And who knows what bloody method is, whatever! Everybody has a method of some sort, but I just like to simmer in it, but also be human and be with my husband, be with my daughter, cook, not care. I don’t think I could sustain where I like to go in my work if I didn’t have someplace to come back and just be absolutely human.”

I think love is terrifying. I have been scared of love for a lot of my life, and it took me a long while to discover what that word even meant for me, not just the idea of it.

Together, Zhao and Buckley found aspects of Buckley’s Hamnet character Agnes in that home. “I cooked and I was grinding my spices and she was like, ‘Yes! The witch is alive!’ And we sat by the fire and had a big old chat about life and love. And I think we saw each other, and I think that’s very important.”

Buckley may not have read Hamnet before meeting Zhao, but she certainly had a relationship with Shakespeare, in fact she says the Bard is “how I discovered myself as an actress.” One of her first acting jobs was at the Globe Theater for its summer season, playing Miranda in The Tempest. And back when she was coming off of I’d Do Anything, that show’s producer Cameron Mackintosh stepped in to support her in a way that brought Shakespeare to the forefront. “I was so raw, but it was at the beginning of my career. And he very kindly offered to pay for me to go to RADA (the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art) to do a four-week Shakespeare course, because I really had had no training and was so raw with my expression and feeling. That changed how I saw myself because I thought I would do music. I thought I’d do musicals. I thought that was the place that I felt I could fill myself in. And then I did Shakespeare. I did a little bit from The Winter’s Tale. The capacity in just one word was just bottomless. I discovered myself as an actress and that really, really changed how I saw myself.”

He said to me, ‘The thing about you, Jessie, is you’re like fire and I’m going to catch you.’ And I thought, Oh f—k off. Good luck.

In Hamnet, Buckley is Agnes and Paul Mescal is her husband, Will Shakespeare. Buckley and Mescal knew each other a bit before, she says, but their connection was really cemented over a series of nights out at a New York club.

“We met first on The Lost Daughter,” Buckley recalls. But we never worked together in The Lost Daughter, we just got drunk on Olivia Colman’s balcony. We just knew each other from around, we didn’t know each other. And I was in New York filming just before I started Hamnet, and so was he, and we’d go out to this place called Joy Face for a few dances. I think it’s very vulnerable to give yourself over to somebody when you know the journey you need to go on together. And I remember in Joy Face this one night, he said to me, ‘The thing about you, Jessie, is you’re like fire and I’m going to catch you.’ And I thought, oh f—k off. Good luck.” She laughs. “But I think what he meant is, I would contain your fire. And that is what we did, was to be each other’s life force, the places we have to go, we were like, ‘Wherever this takes us, I’ve got you.’ And we really were a meeting of minds and hearts without any hierarchy, with just pure commitment to telling this story as bravely and humanly as we dare to with each other.”

Hamnet was shot chronologically and the first time Agnes meets Will, there is almost instant chemistry, or perhaps even love. Does Buckley believe in love at first sight? “Yeah, I do,” she says. “I think it’s not what I ever expect it to be. The real stuff is not ever what I expect it to be. So even that magnetism might transcend or transform into a very different, layered, complex, full thing. And I guess that depends on where you are in your life and how open you are to that. I think love is terrifying. I have been scared of love for a lot of my life, and it took me a long while to discover what that word even meant for me, not just the idea of it. I think sometimes love at first sight, it’s too much of a projected idea for it to… I think it takes… You can’t just make a meal. You have to cook it.”

I think he’s the most extraordinary man. I think he’s an incredible actor. I mean, he’s only 30. He’s gone from playing Shakespeare to Paul McCartney. The breadth of this man is ginormous, and he held me.

She notes that some of her key relationships have evolved in the same organic way that her work grows. “Some of the biggest relationships in my life haven’t been immediately obvious. And I would say that’s the same with the characters that I meet. It’s like when I do a part, when I’m like, oh, yeah, OK, this. It’s not because I am absolutely sure. Most of the time I’m really not sure, but there’s something about this essence of this character that is just tugging me with curiosity, and I have to know more about them… I have to over time, and with fear, and with obsession, and dreams and not sleeping, and reading a book that is completely pointless and then discovering one sentence that’s worth everything, I have to really massage that relationship into me and with me, and then I can go.”

Buckley gets a faraway look as she speaks of the connection she built with Mescal for Hamnet. “I really know in my heart he is somebody who is instrumental to me as an artist. And I feel and hope we will meet many, many times and go on very transformative journeys together, because that’s what this experience was. I think he’s the most extraordinary man. I think he’s an incredible actor. I mean, he’s only 30. He’s gone from playing Shakespeare to Paul McCartney. The breadth of this man is ginormous, and he held me.”

The places where Buckley had to go with this character were extremely intense. Agnes is a deeply spiritual person, “the daughter of a forest witch,” who doesn’t use a ton of dialogue, and yet we feel her feelings so deeply. Buckley had to bring not only the instant chemistry Agnes experiences on first meeting Will, but also the birth experience, and then terrible death of her young son Hamnet, played by Jacobi Jupe. How did she cope with that intensity? “When I work, I like to have absolute intention, but in just touches,” she says. “I’m not somebody who needs to stay in it all the time. I can’t sustain that, and I need to go and have a cup of tea and chat to the crew. But I worked very differently on this.”

I don’t know why that scream came up in that scene. That was not in the script. That was something that came up on the second take of three takes because I loved that little boy and I had gone on a huge journey with him and with Paul and with the idea of motherhood.

A big part of her process with Agnes was a kind of free-form writing. “I wrote so much while I was working on Hamnet. I have a book of Agnes’ unconscious, basically. It would be pictures, it would be dreams, it would be… I was just cooking, you know? And I’m only talking about these bigger moments, but those bigger moments come from every moment of daily life and the relationships that were there with these incredible children who became my children, and Emily Watson [playing Agnes’ mother-in-law] who’s been such an important woman in my life.”

When Hamnet dies, Agnes lets out a sound of pure grief and rage and horror that is almost animal. “I don’t know why that scream came up in that scene,” Buckley says now. “That was not in the script. That was something that came up on the second take of three takes because I loved that little boy and I had gone on a huge journey with him and with Paul and with the idea of motherhood. I think I was really swimming around wanting to be a mother while I was filming this, and I wasn’t a mother at the time, but that capacity to love and that ferocious tenderness. And I guess anytime you bring something into the world, birth something into the world, you’re always dancing within the precipice of life and death. And that really became the space that I was moving in and curious about in every sense.”

It’s the final scene of the film that has wrecked viewers. It’s part of what Mescal told me he saw as “an Olympic acting moment” for Buckley and it’s what surely dissolved that North Hollywood theater audience into sobs.

Set at the Globe Theater, which was painstakingly reconstructed by production designer Fiona Crombie, Agnes pushes her way to the front of the crowd. She’s horrified to learn her husband is putting on a play titled Hamlet. How could he? She’s surrounded by people holding the play’s program printed with her son’s name. She’s enraged, even shouting. And yet, through her husband’s painstakingly crafted play, she will see and understand the ghost of Will’s own grief, and in turn, in her heart, the spirit of their lost child will find peace.

“For Agnes, and for me, those first few days of coming into this space, I was very lost,” Buckley says. “I didn’t know how to ground myself. It was too big, and having to meet this moment of knowing my husband had written this play and stolen my dead son’s name for some reason that I couldn’t fathom, and all these people had a piece of paper with his name on it, and you don’t know him. I was spinning, and it’s such an uncomfortable feeling. As an actor, you go home in the car and you’re like, ‘This is awful, and an awful, awful situation.’ And then I started to get curious about it, and I was like, actually being lost is very human and how brave do I dare to be to be lost? To be seen to be lost? Which is exactly what Agnes is.”

And yet, Zhao and Buckley agreed that the close of the film needed something more. It was on one of her drives home that Buckley would find the puzzle piece for that final scene. Throughout filming, she had been sending Zhao her free-form writing of that day’s shoot “as if the scene was a dream” along with a piece of music which “became sometimes kind of pieces of music for the whole community. For scenes like the birth scene, we used to play these pieces of music throughout the shooting, and it was a bit like dancing, the crew would move into that place, you’d move into that place. For me, it really puts me in your body. I think the crew were like, ‘No more,’” she laughs, “but I can’t do without music, I need it.”

On her way home from a day shooting that last scene, Buckley landed on Richter’s “On the Nature of Daylight”. It was a lyricized version — a mashup of Richter’s piece of music and the 1960 song “This Bitter Earth” performed by Dinah Washington. “It just hit something in me,” Buckley says, and I sent it to Chloé and I think it hit something in her. And I know Chloé was feeling the same. She was feeling the same lostness, as was the crew.”

In fact, several ideas as to how to shoot that scene had been in play, Buckley says. “Chloé was saying the other night, which I’d forgotten, they hired these huge cranes. It was, ‘It’s the end of the film, so you better go out with a bang,’ and all these cranes and the Globe and you’re trying to do these things and you just can’t. It’s too raw. The material’s too raw. And they ended up calling the producer saying, ‘Sorry for spending all that money. We don’t need those cranes.’ But when I said that piece of music, something rippled out and I could recognize that this woman was surrounded by 300 people, me, surrounded by 300 extras, who had undoubtedly experienced loss. And it became not just something that was an isolated feeling, but something that was surrendered for us all to hold each other up and need the play to hold us up or hold the parts of ourselves up that we can’t hold on our own. And from that, it just started to flow.”

Buckley spontaneously reached out her hand, and that became Hamlet, played by Noah Jupe, returning to the stage. Then, the audience as one, reached out to connect in their own shared grief and loss. “There was no reaching out before. There was no Hamlet comes back to the stage. All of that started to come as we were moving through it.”

FOR HER NEXT ACT…

Right before shooting Hamnet, only two weeks before actually, Buckley wrapped Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride!, which releases on March 6^th. Buckley plays a triple-faceted role: Ida, a murdered young woman, Frankenstein writer Mary Shelley and the eponymous resurrected Bride to Christian Bale’s monster character Frank. The film also stars Annette Bening, Penélope Cruz, Peter Sarsgaard and Jake Gyllenhaal.

My experience of being a new mum is there’s another layer of the crap that doesn’t serve you that just sloshes off. I’m allergic to something that’s not real because I have such a real thing in my life.

Of Maggie Gyllenhaal, with whom Buckley worked previously on The Lost Daughter, Buckley says, “She’s somebody in her own artistry is asking herself questions, trying to bring the shadowy bits to the surface and create a language unto herself, as a director, as an artist. Not because she’s a woman, but as an artist, and as somebody who’s got something to say. And being around that and being asked those questions like in Lost Daughter, can a mother be a mother, and be hungry and be in the world? And how do you satiate both of those experiences beside each other? It doesn’t come without pain, and complexity, and guilt and the ground swallowing you. That’s a given, no matter what path you choose, but how do you vibrate between those two things so that something else can break through? It was the same with Bride, she had something to say. And I think she has recognized that I’m also trying to say something with my art, not just be an object of this industry, but actually create a language within it. And when somebody advocates for you to step into that space, that’s essential and that’s incredibly lucky. But I don’t take what she’s offered me and woken in me for granted. It’s like you rebirth yourself in a way.”

And, as with that very first breakfast conversation with Zhao, it’s birth and rebirth. And Buckley’s next job will be her first since her daughter was born. She can’t yet detail exactly what this next project will be, but she knows that her process will be somehow changed from becoming a mother. “I know what I’m doing next. And it’s a really curious time, because it’s a new adventure to go back into the creative process as a new mum. I don’t know what that looks like. There’s part of me that’s nervous because I know that in order to create the things I create, it takes time, and all of a sudden there’s no time. I’ve got no time.”

But if, as a person and an artist, Buckley was rooted in authenticity before, now she’s even more so. “My experience of being a new mum is there’s another layer of the crap that doesn’t serve you that just sloshes off. I’m allergic to something that’s not real because I have such a real thing in my life.”

Later, as we get up to leave, she is determined to find a photo on her phone. “I have to show you,” she says. She scrolls and scrolls and there it is: a silver-haired man in what looks like a trailer or a shed. He’s crouched over a gas canister, a huge saucepan of vegetables suspended above the flame. It’s Hamnet grip Tomasz Sternicki, the man she thanked at the Golden Globes for his soup-making skills. The scene is rustic and basic and very, very real. “Look at that,” she says. “Incredible.”