In Chloé Zhao’s Oscar-nominated Hamnet, Jessie Buckley plays a bereaved mother whose cathartic grief has reduced cinemagoers around the world to stunned silence. Many Buckley fans were stunned all over again when they learned that Ireland’s 2026 Oscar front-runner… isn’t all that keen on cats.
What moggie madness is this? In a recently resurfaced interview for a podcast in November, she boldly declared: “I don’t like cats.”
She was cheered all the way by her costar Paul Mescal, who reminded us that, as befits a former Kildare footballer, his talent for own-goals hasn’t deserted him when he agreed, “F**k cats, honestly… f**k ‘em.”
They could have ended it there. People often speak in haste – we’ve all said and done things we regret. But oh no… Buckley had more to share: “They’re too clever. My husband, when I started to date him… he had two cats.”
One of the pets, she revealed, took a disliking to her and made their feelings known by pooping all over the pillows – leaving Buckley to tell her future husband it was “her or the cats”.
Buckley is an immensely talented actor and singer and a great ambassador for Killarney – where you can expect a statue of her to be unveiled and competitively priced Jessie Buckley T-shirts to be on sale the instant she wins her Oscar (as is the bookies’ expectation).
But for those of us with cats in our lives, her anti-cat vibes are what Americans would call “problematic”. I haven’t seen Hamnet – but if I had, I’d want to build a time machine and go back and give it a skip. As Buckley and Mescal are about to discover, cat lovers take feline-dissing personally. We have, of course, heard it all before: cats are unaffectionate, scheming, only interested in food and pampering.
Setting aside the obvious point that the same could be said of many human beings, there is the fact that this simply isn’t true. I speak from experience with our family having taken in a cat in 2023 after she was abandoned and left to fend for herself. Agatha was hungry, in dire need of veterinary attention – but above all, she had been badly affected by rejection.
Her origins are a mystery to us – she just appeared on the back windowsill one day, mewing and making big kitty eyes. The theory we have arrived at is that she was a pandemic kitten who was shown the door when the circumstances of her original owner changed. Whatever the truth, she had clearly endured some sort of emotional trauma – as much as food and shelter, she required love and attention.
Fair enough, cats will never give you back that love in the demonstrative way that a dog will. But their emotional needs are every bit as real as those of a dog – the fact they don’t slobber all over you or sniff the bums of other cats doesn’t mean that they don’t have internal lives.
The other point to make is that cats are absolutely hilarious. Where dogs are big, hairy goofballs, cats are a constant source of chuckles. They take themselves so seriously yet are endlessly funny – whether attacking your sock, getting trapped inside an open shoebox or demonstrating a sudden need to dangle from the curtains. With a cat in your life, you will never lack for something to laugh about.
It may sound facetious, but could Buckley’s worrying anti-cat views impact her Oscar hopes? You would hope that isn’t the case, but with that Oscar win seemingly just a whisker away, Buckley could do without alienating the feline-fancying votes in the Academy. Cat lovers can forgive a lot – scratches, constant begging for food, the occasional poo in the flower bed. But throwing shade at cats is just a bridge too far. Fingers – and tiny adorable paws – crossed that Buckley doesn’t face some kitty karma further down the line.