“I actually have no idea what bodily experience I’d just had, but I literally had snot running down my nose and was snorting with laughter within [a span of] five minutes,” says Jessie Buckley, recounting the email she sent to Women Talking co-star and producer Frances McDormand describing her reaction to seeing the film for the first time. “I got such a shock because I had no idea what we were doing at the time.”
Buckley has shown strength after strength as myriad characters since her breakout role as Marya Bolkonskaya in the 2016 BBC miniseries adaptation of War & Peace. Currently, she shares the screen with Claire Foy, Rooney Mara, Ben Whishaw and McDormand in Women Talking, written and directed by Sarah Polley and based on the 2018 bestseller by Miriam Toews about a Mennonite community whose women have been violently and sexually abused by the men, and who must choose to forgive and forget, stay and fight, or leave and start anew.
The ensemble is jointly nominated at the Screen Actors Guild Awards for best cast – facing off against the casts of Babylon, The Banshees Of Inisherin, Everything Everywhere All At Once and The Fabelmans.
Telluride 2022 premiere Women Talking follows a number of roles for Buckley in films foregrounding female characters, and/or directed by women – recently including Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Lost Daughter (2021) and Philippa Lowthorpe’s Misbehaviour (2020).
“Sarah is an extraordinary woman,” says Buckley of the Women Talking filmmaker, adding that she didn’t know much about Polley before this project came up. She was drawn to working with her after meeting, talking and also watching her 2012 documentary Stories We Tell.
“She’s such a powerful leader and a beautifully vulnerable leader,” says Buckley of working the filmmaker. “She’s so intensely curious – she’ll take everybody’s perspective and hold it and mind it and support it and allow it to exist and allow you to fall apart and have somebody there in the wings to be there to hold you as well.
“I feel I’ve woken up in the last few years, with people like Maggie [Gyllenhaal] and Sarah [Polley] — these people who are so brave and who are making me articulate things that, at the age of 16 or 17, I would never, ever have thought I would say to myself or say to the world.”
Working on instinct
Beginning her career in 2008 as a singer and a stage actress, Buckley moved into screen acting quickly with small roles on British television. But ask her if she has a process of how to decide what she wants to take on, and it’s a short answer: “No.”
“You always have to kind of feel something,” she expands. “I like to feel that I have absolutely no idea how to do it. That’s what I like. And often I feel like certain stories meet you at certain points in your life and it’s almost serendipity. There can be different reasons why you choose to do things. For example, Men [Alex Garland’s folk horror film] and Women Talking both came at around the same time and they’re two very different kinds of pieces, but actually, who knows what both of them might offer me or what I might come to understand from these things. Then sometimes, you just want to have fun and do something really light and naughty.”
Falling into the latter category would appear to be the Thea Sharrock-directed Wicked Little Letters, reuniting with her The Lost Daughter co-star Olivia Colman – although the pair never shared any scenes on that earlier occasion since Buckley played the younger version of Colman’s character.
“We just drank wine and did sing-songs on the roof,” she says about her experiences with Colman on Gyllenhaal’s film. Having now actually shared screen time with the Oscar winner, she reveals, “It seems effortless and yet soulful. Everybody should work with Olivia Colman in some capacity at some point in their life. It’s good for you.”
In Wicked Little Letters, she adds: “We’re both very naughty in it, and it was a lot of fun.”
Buckley shot Wicked Little Letters – which is produced by Blueprint Pictures alongside Colman and partner Ed Sinclair’s South Of The River Pictures, with Studiocanal and Film4 fully financing – back to back with Fingernails, from 2021 UK Screen Star of Tomorrow screenwriter Sam Steiner and Athens-born director Christos Nikou (Apples, 2020).
Renaissance woman
In November 2021, Buckley began a four-month run co-starring in the West End revival of Cabaret with Eddie Redmayne. Half a year later, she released “For All Our Days That Tear The Heart”, an album of melodic and melancholy songs written and performed with former Suede guitarist Bernard Butler – which debuted at 23 on the UK albums chart and made the 12-strong shortlist for the 2022 Mercury Prize. She also performed all her own songs in the 2018 film Wild Rose and grew up surrounded by singing — her mother was a vocal coach and encouraged her training in the discipline. Today, Buckley feels that she gives an equal amount of passion and effort to both acting and singing.
“They’re all stories,” she says. “Singing for me, I guess it feels like a very free thing. I don’t want anything from singing but to feel completely free to have that relationship with an audience. And I could do that in the tiniest little club that nobody goes to, which some of my favourite ever gigs have been, or singing in a theatre to 1,500 people and feeling like the whole place is embodying you. But my way of finding access to tell a story is the same, the way I do any of it is chaos — I just throw paint at the wall, put things into a big cooking pot, and whatever comes out in that moment or wherever I feel drawn to because of the material, that’s really how it happens. It’s messy.”
With acting, Buckley relishes digging deep into her characters. “My want is to really get to know somebody. To have somebody come into my life over months and change my perspective and what I might have understood about myself and the world that I’ve been living in.”
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