JESSIE BUCKLEY

IS A FORCE OF NATURE…

After coming second in BBC talent show I’d Do Anything’s search for Oliver!’s Nancy, Irish singer-actress Jessie Buckley has wowed on stage in The Tempest, Henry V and The Winter’s Tale, and in the Beeb’s prestige dramas War And Peace (as Marya Bolkonskaya) and Taboo (as Tom Hardy’s step-mum Lorna Bow). She’s sensational in film debut Beast, playing an elemental woman attracted to a dangerous stranger.

Were you immediately drawn to Moll?

I know it sounds fucking clichéd, but I just rang my agent and said, “I absolutely love this.” I felt intrigued by this woman, and challenged by her, and terrified… All the good things to make you want to do it. I didn’t really know who she was but I knew I had a sense of here somewhere inside me.

Was your chemistry with Johnny Flynn’s mysterious Pascal instant?

We got on immediately. He’s now one of my great friends. And so fantastic in the film. It’s a journey of love [that Moll undertakes], and if it wasn’t the right kind of chemistry, we wouldn’t have got the film we got in the end.

Beast is set in Jersey. Could you relate, having grown up yourself in Killarney, County Kerry?

Definitely. It’s such a character in itself, Jersey. In one breath you have this wild, elemental landscape, and at the heart of it you have a very conservative, buttoned-up community where they have someone measuring the height of hedges. I remember reading the character descriptions in the audition bio before I went in: “She’s a girl who would eat worms at school.” I’m like, “Yeah, that’s me.” [laughs]

How different was shooting a movie to a play or miniseries?

I didn’t find a big difference. Whatever canvas it is, I’m telling a story and trying to make it work. I put everything that

I had into making it as raw and provocative as I could. JG

ETA | 27 APRIL / BEAST OPENS THIS MONTH.