\n Jessie Buckley is one of the favourites to win the Best Actress prize at the 98th Academy Awards for her incredible performance as bereaved mother Agnes in Hamnet, which is released this month.\n<\/p>\n
\n Directed by Oscar-winner Chlo\u00e9 Zhao and based on the novel by Maggie O’Farrell, it tells the story of Agnes and William Shakespeare and the death of their only son, Hamnet, and how it became the origin of one of the Bard’s most famous plays, Hamlet.\n<\/p>\n
\n Gladiator and Normal People star Paul Mescal – who is also tipped for an Oscar nod this awards season – plays William Shakespeare, with Emily Watson and Joe Alwyn also in the cast.\n<\/p>\n
\n The film has already won the Toronto International Film Festival\u2019s People\u2019s Choice Award and was selected as the best film of the Telluride Film Festival, where it had its world premiere, by both press and industry voters and by the general public.\n<\/p>\n
\n Jessie Buckley stars as Agnes in director Chloe Zhao’s Hamnet. (Image: Agata Grzybowska \/Focus Features LLC)\n<\/p>\n
\n Jessie divides her time between Norfolk and London and last year, on the podcast Table Manners with Jessie and Lennie Ware, she described Norfolk as her ‘heart home’.\n<\/p>\n
\n She and her husband, Freddie, who she met on a blind date, held their wedding in the county – complete with a keg of Guinness and cheese toasties. And she told the mother and daughter duo that Norfolk is the place where she comes to decompress, saying ‘I don’t see anybody and I just love cooking’.\n<\/p>\n
\n ‘This house that we live in…is like 1500s and falling down and orange and it’s a really amazing old house that’s been there forever,’ she told them.\n<\/p>\n
\n Jessie’s previous credits include War and Peace, Chernobyl and Fargo on TV, films including Wild Rose, The Lost Daughter and Wicked Little Letters (the latter two opposite Norfolk Oscar winner Olivia Colman) and her award-winning stage turn as Sally Bowles in Cabaret. And this Christmas she voiced the character of Betty O’Barley in The Scarecrows’ Wedding, the BBC’s latest festive Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler adaptation.\n<\/p>\n
\n Speaking at the recent Mill Valley Film Festival, where she won an award for her performance, Jessie talked about taking on this immense role and the physicality and emotion she brought to such a rich part.\n<\/p>\n
\n The actress, who recently became a mother for the first time, also spoke about her journey to stardom, from her Irish roots to her early experiences working on Shakespeare plays alongside the greats like Judi Dench and Kenneth Branagh.\n<\/p>\n
\n Jessie Buckley stars as Agnes and Paul Mescal as William Shakespeare in director Chloe Zhao’s Hamnet. (Image: Agata Grzybowska \/Focus Features LLC)\n<\/p>\n
\n Jessie, this is an extraordinary performance. How did you become involved with the film?\n<\/p>\n
\n We\u2019d [Jessie and director Chlo\u00e9 Zhao] met at Telluride [Film Festival] after they do the group photocall. And then we met and had lunch, and I hadn\u2019t read the book then, and immediately we were kind of talking, having afterwards read the book, in hindsight, within the language of the book, within the language of Agnes [her character]. You know, talking about death and doulas and nature.\n<\/p>\n
\n After the meeting, my agent said, “This is actually something to do with a book called Hamnet that Chloe might be directing.” And I went home, and I read it in one night. I didn\u2019t sleep. I couldn\u2019t put it down. She [Agnes] just kind of came through me like an earthquake. And those moments, even those initial experiences, are so tangible, and they\u2019re so rare. And especially they are rare because they collide with so many things, like the moment that you\u2019re in in your life, what you\u2019re hoping to touch. And for it to be there in writing \u2013 I couldn\u2019t breathe. And you\u2019re always delicate when you first meet these things because there\u2019s always a reality that it might not happen. But in my heart, I always put these things under my pillow, hoping they will happen in some shape or form.\n<\/p>\n
\n What was it about this character that you connected with so strongly?\n<\/p>\n
\n I think what is extraordinary, what Maggie O\u2019Farrell did with this woman, is that she kind of contained all of Shakespeare\u2019s great heroines within this one woman. She\u2019s Juliet, Lady Macbeth, she\u2019s Paulina, she\u2019s Perdita, Ophelia, she\u2019s all of the great heroines that are often in the background behind the male story. And Maggie O\u2019Farrell went and brought that person and made that story the kind of cyclone of which this family are moving around. I love women. I love women, and I\u2019m fiercely curious about them. And I\u2019ve had the great privilege in my life to work with extraordinary directors who are women, who are unafraid and uncompromising to bring the bits of woman that have been repressed or, you know, clipped, which are deemed monstrous, which are too much, to the surface. I think the last few years, I\u2019ve been just curious about the bits that have been pushed down or unpalatable, the unpalatableness of what it is to be a woman.\n<\/p>\n
\n Director of photography Lukasz Zal, director Chloe Zhao and actors Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal on the set of Hamnet. (Image: Agata Grzybowska \/Focus Features LLC)\n<\/p>\n
\n What was the key to opening up this character for you?\n<\/p>\n
\n I think the biggest thing that I discovered in Agnes and with Chlo\u00e9 is something that I was looking for in my work and in the work that I wanted to do and the stories that I was looking to tell. Sometimes strong women are misjudged as being hard and cold, and there\u2019s defensiveness. And that is true. I know those women. I\u2019ve played those women. But I know what\u2019s really at the bottom of that well is tenderness, which is a ferocious, fierce, brave place to live. And Agnes had that in bucketloads. And Chlo\u00e9 was the director who I think saw that in me and invited me to be brave enough to bring that tenderness to the foreground.\n<\/p>\n
\n Grief is the central theme of this film. How did you go into those moments of playing a woman who has lost a child?\n<\/p>\n
\n You go into it with curiosity. That\u2019s the only way you can travel through anything. We\u2019ve all experienced grief in some shape or form, but where it begins and ends is infinite. And I guess the way Chlo\u00e9 works is how present can you be with what\u2019s alive in the room to let that grief move through you and be what it is in that moment. I am a mother now. I wasn\u2019t a mother at the time. It is unimaginable to me what that must be like, and with absolute respect, I knew that if I was to tell the story of this grief with respect and justice, I had to just excavate the possibility or the imaginative possibility of what that might be. Grief has its own journey for every single person. And that\u2019s what this film also exposes, is that Will has a completely different ability or skill set to express his grief than I do, and similarly with all the children.\n<\/p>\n
\n Jessie Buckley stars as Agnes and Joe Alwyn as Bartholomew in director Chloe Zhao’s Hamnet. (Image: Courtesy of Focus Features LLC)\n<\/p>\n
\n There’s an incredible emotional truth in the film. Did you find that it was a physical thing or an emotional thing? How did that develop for you?\n<\/p>\n
\n Well, I don\u2019t think it\u2019s ever either or. For me, anyway. The more I work, the more I want to be unconscious and just be in something. The gift of being an actor is you get to see the world in a different way, but you also get to know the world in a way that you didn\u2019t understand before. And with this woman…her heart was this big open wound, and she had this ferocious tenderness and a singular kind of just energy that was so in her body. Whether it was giving birth at the root of a tree or wailing at the loss of her son. I always want to be in a certain state of unknown so that I can just live it. And I guess the way that Chlo\u00e9 works and the way that I work and how we collaborated together was really how present can I be to just be in this woman and live with her. And when you have incredible people like Paul [Mescal] and Jacobi [Jupe] and Emily Watson and all the incredible cast and crew around you to contain that space for you and just look into their faces, it\u2019s a joy.\n<\/p>\n
\n What’s your relationship with Shakespeare the writer?\n<\/p>\n
\n I was intimidated of him at school…I couldn\u2019t grasp it. And when I thought about doing theatre, I thought I\u2019d do musical theatre because I had all this feeling and it felt like at least music could contain it all. And then I moved to London and a producer asked if I wanted to go and do a four-week Shakespeare course at RADA. And it was the first time I\u2019d actually done Shakespeare. And it blew my mind. I could not believe how much one word could contain everything that was inside. And it changed what I realised in myself. I was like, “Oh, no, I want to act. I want to just know and move through words. And if these are the words that are there, then amazing. I just want to do Shakespeare.” Later, I went back to RADA, but after I finished, my first job was at The Globe Theatre.\n<\/p>\n
\n Actors Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal with director Chloe Zhao on the set of Hamnet. (Image: Agata Grzybowska \/Focus Features LLC)\n<\/p>\n
\n Who were you playing?\n<\/p>\n
\n Miranda, in The Tempest. And then most of my early career was doing Shakespeare with Judi Dench and Kenneth Branagh and sitting in the wings. I did The Winter\u2019s Tale, and Judi Dench is my absolute idol. Like, ritual, run down every night when she was doing [her performance] and sit in the wings. If I didn\u2019t watch her do it, I would have cursed myself for the whole play. She was the reason to be. So he\u2019s been a massive part of my life. The house I live in, my home [in Norfolk], is 1500s. And it\u2019s based off Anne Hathaway\u2019s house. So he\u2019s there.\n<\/p>\n
\n What makes Chlo\u00e9 Zhao so special as a director?\n<\/p>\n
\n She brought together a group of artists who wanted to go on a journey. And I think Chlo\u00e9, as a leader and as a director – she\u2019s like a conductor. She\u2019s trying to tune herself to listen to everybody. She\u2019s also kind of chaotic sometimes [laughs]. But chaos is kind of interesting in creating something and making something. Everybody that was there was there in such a pure way to create humanity. And I think we all felt, with this story, that our job was to become more human in the task of making this story live and have the experience that we wanted to have. Her chaotic side was disappearing, and letting the imagination of every single person in that room run. And then she\u2019d come in and, like some Jedi leader, it was like, \u2018One shot, one take, one set up, go.\u2019 And we\u2019d just go.\n<\/p>\n
\n Hamnet is in cinemas from January 9.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Jessie Buckley is one of the favourites to win the Best Actress prize at the 98th Academy Awards…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":400442,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[6491,96,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-400441","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-celebrities","8":"tag-celebrities","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/400441","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=400441"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/400441\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/400442"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=400441"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=400441"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=400441"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}