In the moment with Jessie Buckley
Meet the actor who can do anything
Charlie Kaufman’s new film I’m Thinking of Ending Things, which came to Netflix last month, split the critics. For every “another superb nightmare” (The Guardian **** ) there was a “it’s just a Debbie Downer dud” (Variety). (There was also: “It exists outside the good/bad spectrum” (Collider), which we’ll call ‘undecided’.)
One thing everyone did agree on, though, was that its star, Jessie Buckley, was superb. “This is Buckley’s show, and she further cements her status as one of the gutsiest and most intuitive actors in the world” (IndieWire). “Buckley continues her streak of grounding, heavy-duty narratives with emotionally shattering interiority” (America’s The Globe and Mail). And so on.
Kaufman’s existential brain-scrambler — a student’s road-trip to meet her boyfriend’s parents turns into a horror show — was the latest assignment in which the Irish actress could demonstrate her I-can-do-anything versatility. She anchored 2017’s psychological terror Beast, filled big shoes as Rosalyn Wilder, Judy Garland’s unflappable personal assistant, opposite Renée Zellweger in 2019’s Oscar-winning Judy, and achieved worldwide fame playing Lyudmilla Ignatenko in Chernobyl the same year, a TV series so universally applauded it even got two thumbs up from Russia’s culture minister.
Buckley’s route to critical adulation was unusual. Having had her application to London drama school rejected, she walked into an audition for I’d Do Anything, the 2008 BBC talent show to find a new Nancy for a West End revival of Oliver!. Andrew Lloyd Webber was head judge and Graham Norton hosted. Buckley was 18 and came second. (Later, she auditioned for the movie version of Cats, but didn’t get it. Insert your “luck of the Irish” joke here.) Before
that, she performed in school productions in County Tipperary and studied piano, clarinet and harp at the Royal Irish Academy of Music.
“Not having very much to do but make up things when we were small, I would dress up my brother, and then, if I liked his clothes, I would tell him that I wanted to be that character,” she recalled during a recent Zoom call with Esquire. “My parents would sit through terrible [home] productions of Oliver! and Annie where I would jump around between the characters that seemed the most important. I’d take a cushion and place it on the floor of our sitting room and sing, ‘Where is Love?’”
Next, we’ll see her in the anthology series Fargo, the fourth season of which is set in 1950 and follows two warring crime syndicates, the Italian mafia and an African-American crime family led by Chris Rock. Buckley plays a gutsy, drugsnorting nurse whose place in the Fargo universe is confirmed by her robust Minnesotan accent.
Buckley’s two projects after that are playing opposite Ken Watanabe in Cottontail, a drama set in Beatrix Potter country, and The Lost Daughter, an adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s blockbuster novel The Story of the Lost Child, directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal and co-starring Dakota Johnson, Olivia Colman and Normal People’s Paul Mescal. This summer, she was supposed to play Juliet in Romeo and Juliet at the National Theatre.
“Her ability to be in the moment is really extraordinary,” Kaufman tells Esquire. “The way she goes with whatever is happening in the room, with the other actors, it’s really what I’m looking for in anybody who’s performing.”
“Acting is about exploring how you can open your whole body up to humanity and explore what that means and all the fullest colours that it comes with,” Buckley says. “That’s what made me fall in love with it.”
○ Fargo is on Netflix now
‘Acting is how you can open your whole body up to humanity and explore all the fullest colours that it comes with’