Jessie Buckley, the actress whose women never wait to be saved

Before the Oscar, before the BAFTA, before the Golden Globe that made her the most decorated actress of the season, Jessie Buckley came second on a BBC talent show. The competition was looking for a new Nancy for the West End revival of Oliver!, and she was from Killarney in County Kerry, and she nearly won. She did not get the part. What she got instead was a decade and a half of preparation for a career that no category in acting has been able to contain.

Growing up in Kerry, Buckley was not only a future actress but a musician — grade eight in piano, clarinet, and harp, trained at the Royal Irish Academy of Music, part of the Tipperary Millennium Orchestra while her mother taught singing at the local school. Born on December 28, 1989, she went to London for RADA, graduating in January 2013 into a theatre world that already knew she was technically formidable. Her early stage work — at Shakespeare’s Globe, in West End productions — confirmed the range but not yet the danger. The danger came from film.

Her film debut in Michael Pearce’s Beast (2017) was the first signal. Playing Moll Huntford, a woman on the Jersey coast whose relationship with a suspected murderer is the story’s central and unresolved question, Buckley was simultaneously terrifying and sympathetic in ways that almost nothing in British cinema had room for. Wild Rose (2018), Tom Harper’s portrait of a Glasgow country singer recently released from prison, gave her a full lead role and the kind of performance that earns nominations — she received her first BAFTA nod for Best Actress. Then came Chernobyl: the 2019 HBO miniseries put her in front of a global audience for the first time, playing Lyudmila Ignatenko, the young wife of a Chernobyl firefighter who refuses to leave his hospital bedside despite the radioactive risk. The performance was the quietest thing she had done on screen and it was impossible to look away from.

What followed was a period of deliberate aesthetic risk-taking that other actresses at her level rarely attempt. I’m Thinking of Ending Things (2020), Charlie Kaufman’s metaphysical horror film, put her in an existential nightmare that never fully explained itself — she played a character whose very identity dissolves. The Lost Daughter (2021), Maggie Gyllenhaal’s adaptation of Elena Ferrante, gave her a supporting role as the younger version of Olivia Colman’s protagonist: a young mother silently shattering. She received an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress. Men (2022), Alex Garland’s folk-horror provocation, required her to carry a film in which she was the only character not multiplied into nightmare. She did all of this without becoming a recognisable type.

In parallel, Buckley pursued the musical stage with a seriousness that bordered on the obsessive. Approached personally by Eddie Redmayne to play Sally Bowles in a 2021 West End revival of Cabaret, she maintained strict vocal silence on days when she was not performing — eight shows a week demanded it. The Olivier Award for Best Actress in a Musical followed. She also recorded a collaborative album with musician Bernard Butler, For All Our Days That Tear the Heart, shortlisted for the 2022 Mercury Prize. It is the kind of additional creative project that gets dismissed as a side hustle when it is, in fact, evidence of an artist who cannot be contained to a single medium.

There is a version of the Jessie Buckley story that has solidified into myth since the Oscar: the humble girl from Kerry who made it to the top through sheer authenticity. It is not false, but it is incomplete. The real story is that Buckley has consistently, deliberately chosen projects designed to disorient her audience — and this has occasionally meant commercial failure. The Bride! (2026), Maggie Gyllenhaal’s punk Gothic reimagining of Frankenstein’s monster in 1930s Chicago, received mixed reviews and was a box office disappointment despite a cast of extraordinary weight. Buckley’s performance in a dual role was noted by critics as the most committed thing in an otherwise undisciplined film. The film’s failure was not her failure. But it is worth acknowledging: the narrative of inevitable Oscar-season triumph ignores a career-long pattern of making choices with a real possibility of not working.

Hamnet (2025), directed by Chloé Zhao, gave her a role that collapsed all of her previous themes into a single performance. Agnes Shakespeare — the woman who marries a young William Shakespeare in Stratford-upon-Avon, who has three children with him, who watches their son Hamnet die of plague at eleven while her husband writes plays in London — is not a woman who waits patiently for history to notice her. Buckley plays her as a force of nature barely contained by the domestic world that history assigned her. Paul Mescal’s Shakespeare watches her from across the room as if he has no idea what to do next. That dynamic — the woman who cannot be domesticated, the man who will eventually transform the grief of losing their son into the most studied play in English — is the fulcrum of the film. At the Academy Awards in 2026, Buckley became the first Irish actress to win Best Actress in the award’s history. At her BAFTA acceptance speech earlier that season, she said she shared the award with her daughter, born in 2025.

She lives in Norfolk with her husband Freddie Sorensen and their daughter. Alice Rohrwacher’s Three Incestuous Sisters, alongside Dakota Johnson and Saoirse Ronan, was scheduled to begin filming in spring 2026. In May of that year came the announcement of Hold On to Your Angels, Benh Zeitlin’s new film, pairing her again with Paul Mescal, with production set to begin in February 2027. What she will do with the post-Oscar weight of expectation is the question her industry is waiting to answer — though the pattern of her career suggests she will answer it by choosing something no one saw coming.