{"id":233699,"date":"2026-01-08T05:58:14","date_gmt":"2026-01-08T05:58:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/233699\/"},"modified":"2026-01-08T05:58:14","modified_gmt":"2026-01-08T05:58:14","slug":"jessie-buckley-reveals-special-bond-with-hamnet-co-star","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/233699\/","title":{"rendered":"Jessie Buckley reveals special bond with Hamnet co-star"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hamnet star Jessie Buckley has revealed that she and her young co-star Jacobi Jupe shared a special bond on set and gave each other nicknames to help each other deal with difficult scenes.<\/p>\n

Kerry-born actress Buckley plays William Shakespeare’s wife Agnes Hathaway – historically known as Anne – in the acclaimed film opposite Kildare star Paul Mescal as the famed playwright as they struggle to process the death of their 11-year-old son Hamnet.<\/p>\n

While the two Irish actors have garnered most of the attention, Jupe also gives a hugely impressive performance as the titular boy, who is said to have been the inspiration for his father\u2019s masterpiece, Hamlet.<\/p>\n

\"Jessie
\nJessie Buckley and Paul Mescal in Hamnet<\/p>\n

The first half of the movie, which is adapted from Maggie O\u2019Farrell\u2019s novel and directed by Oscar winner Chlo\u00e9 Zhao, portrays the courtship and marriage of Will and Agnes but it takes a very dark turn during a heart-rending scene as Hamnet battles the plague and his mother tries desperately to save him.<\/p>\n

Speaking to RT\u00c9 Entertainment, Buckley (36) said, “Me and Jacobi created such a close little bond. I love that little boy, he\u2019s extraordinary. I call him ‘walnut\u2019 and he calls me \u2018shell\u2019.<\/p>\n

\"Hamnet
\nJacobi Jupe as Hamnet<\/p>\n

“For that scene on that day, Chlo\u00e9 asked us to go to a very present and primal place. She created a container where we could feel safe and trust enough that we could go wherever we wanted to go.”<\/p>\n

She added, “I had no idea where I was going to go on that day. There was no scream written into the script. I don\u2019t know where grief begins and ends and with the unfathomable idea of losing a child, I really had to take my hands off the wheel and see what came through and luckily I had created such a strong bond with this little boy and we really were a team.<\/p>\n

\"LOS<\/p>\n

“In between takes, I said to Jacobi if it gets too much you come over to me and say \u2018walnut\u2019, I\u2019ll be your shell. Sit down and we\u2019ll take five minutes and then we\u2019ll go again. I guess it\u2019s just the bond, I don\u2019t know how to talk about it, I don\u2019t know what happened. It comes from an unconscious place and it will never happen like that again.<\/p>\n

“That\u2019s just the way the grief came out that day with that little boy.”<\/p>\n

Buckley won the Best Actress honour at the Critics\u2019 Choice Awards earlier this week<\/a> for her role in the film, while English actor Jupe, who is the son of former Coronation Street star Katy Cavanagh and filmmaker Chris Jupe, was also nominated for Best Young Performer.<\/p>\n

Buckley\u2019s co-star, Mescal (29) was also full of praise for the young actor, with whom he has a beautiful and very believable father-son relationship with in the film.<\/p>\n

\"Jacobi
\nJacobi Jupe as Hamnet and Paul Mescal as William Shakespeare in Hamnet<\/p>\n

“I did a Q&A with him in London recently and he is such a fascinating human being and he\u2019s also so warm and so wise,” Mescal says. “He doesn\u2019t strike me as an 11-year-old but he\u2019s nothing like an 11-year-old at the same time. It\u2019s fascinating.”<\/p>\n

Of course, Hamnet isn\u2019t the first portrayal of Shakespeare on the big or small screen.<\/p>\n

Kenneth Branagh, a man who knows his way around a soliloquy or two, played him in Ben Elton\u2019s skittish All is True<\/a> in 2019 and David Mitchell portrayed him as an exasperated man of letters in Elton\u2019s period sitcom Upstart Crow.<\/p>\n

\"Jessie<\/p>\n

And back in the 1998, Shakespeare in Love, starring Jospeh Fiennes as the struggling young playwright, took historical liberties with our albeit hazy record of his private life and won an extraordinary seven Oscars out of 13 nominations.<\/p>\n

This isn\u2019t Mescal\u2019s first brush with Shakespeare either. Back in 2018, he played Demetrius in Rough Magic\u2019s production of A Midsummer Night\u2019s Dream.<\/p>\n

However, playing Shakespeare himself is a dream role for any actor and while we think we know him, he is still a remote figure from over 400 years ago – a very famous man pieced together from fragments of often unreliable and contradictory history.<\/p>\n

“It\u2019s totally that,” Mescal says. “You have the context of the man\u2019s life and his plays but you know very little about what his life was like and that was what I thought was the genius of Maggie\u2019s book.<\/p>\n

“She wrote something you could theorise about or speculate about. Something that was very authentic and real and something that was very playable as an actor.<\/p>\n

\"Jessie<\/p>\n

“There was also her curiosity not just about his genius but also his life and the people that he loved. It shifts what you might know about Shakespeare and makes it a very human story and it roots him in reality rather than myth.”<\/p>\n

With a Critics\u2019 Choice Award – traditionally seen as a good indicator of how the Oscars will play out – already on Buckley\u2019s mantlepiece, talk has now turned to Academy Awards for her and Mescal.<\/p>\n

How ever much they\u2019d like one, they both seem keen to play down the Hamnet Oscar buzz.<\/p>\n

“That\u2019s a difficult one,” says the actor who shot to fame following his role in Normal People. “This is an interesting juncture for us with this film. We didn\u2019t make this with any intention of winning awards. and the audience perspective is totally different.<\/p>\n

“Everyone likes to compartmentalise films -\u2018oh, this is something the Academy will love\u2019 or \u2018this is something for the independent theatres\u2019 or \u2018this is something for fans of blockbusters . . . \u2018”<\/p>\n

“That reduces it down to something that is very difficult to articulate responsibly..”<\/p>\n

\"Jessie<\/p>\n

However, with its painterly cinematography, actorly performances and the fact that this is a movie about the most beloved fiction writer of all time, Hamnet is exactly the kind of thing the Academy will love.<\/p>\n

“We didn\u2019t make it that way,” says Buckley. “We\u2019re just in the river and that is going to take its own course. We\u2019ve done our work. The biggest prize is that people are responding to it in the way they are. We made this for an audience.<\/p>\n

“We made it for people to go to the cinemas and actually feel something, whether they are people in the Academy or people in Dublin or people in Paris or New York or wherever they see this, if we can affect one person with this story then our job is done.<\/p>\n

“We\u2019re all very proud that we have made a story that can affect people because that is very rare.”<\/p>\n

Hamnet is in cinemas on the 8 of January<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Hamnet star Jessie Buckley has revealed that she and her young co-star Jacobi Jupe shared a special bond…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":233700,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-233699","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233699","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=233699"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233699\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/233700"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=233699"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=233699"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=233699"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}