Jessie Buckley on Hamnet, working with Paul Mescal, and her first Christmas as a mum

Fresh from Golden Globe nominations and the Irish premiere, Esther McCarthy meets lead actress Jessie Buckley and director Chloé Zhao to discuss the extraordinary ‘Hamnet’

Mon, 22 Dec, 2025 - 12:26

It is set to be Christmas on the double for Jessie Buckley as she looks forward to celebrating the season with loved ones. After all, she’s marking a very special festive season — the first since her baby daughter arrived into the world five months ago.

This weekend, the Killarney actress is heading for her rural home in Norfolk to mark the end of what has been an extraordinary year.

“All my husband’s family are coming for a pre-Christmas. We’re going to cook one Christmas dinner, and then all my family are coming over for Christmas to us — it’s my little girl’s first Christmas,” she says, adding that she still has lots to organise.

“My husband’s put the Christmas tree up at home. Everyone will muck in, we’ll all cook together. We’ll light a fire. We’ll go for a walk, do very, very simple things — wear tracksuit pants with holes in them and no makeup.”

Buckley is greatly looking forward to the downtime following the release of what’s becoming her most celebrated film in a stellar career. Starring alongside her compatriot Paul Mescal in Hamnet, she is the heart and soul of an intimate and emotional drama, told largely through the perspective of her character.

Hamnet is adapted from the novel by Irish author Maggie O’Farrell, who co-wrote the screenplay with its Oscar-winning director, Chloé Zhao ( Nomadland). It tells the moving story of love and loss that inspired the creation of William Shakespeare’s timeless masterpiece, Hamlet.

Mescal plays the celebrated bard, who falls in love and starts a family with Buckley’s Agnes. Their children include Hamnet, who would later be remembered in the Shakespearian tragedy. Hamnet and Hamlet are in fact the same name, interchangeable in Stratford records in the late 16th and early 17th centuries.

When we meet just hours before the premiere of the film in Dublin, she is side by side with Zhao and it’s evident they’re both excited at the prospect of
showing it to Irish audiences for the first time. Buckley and Mescal have, just days earlier, received Golden Globe Award nominations in what looks set to be a busy awards season for both of them.

Buckley first read O’Farrell’s novel after learning that Zhao wanted her to star in the film. “I’d read I am, I am, I am by Maggie before,” she says. “I actually read it in a book club, and I found the pressure of the book club too intense. They’re not for me, book clubs — I don’t like being told what I’m meant to be doing,” she smiles. She remembers finding Hamnet “intoxicating” when she read it in one sitting throughout the night.

“She’s such an extraordinary writer — she’s a poet, she’s an editor, she’s an excavator. She’s also reframing stories that have been mistold. How she writes is very primal, and there’s so much shadow and complexity and truth and dynamics. It’s not just the genius and his wife. It’s about a marriage, about desire. About ambition and creativity and love and loss and parenthood and being able to love with all the capacity that they hold inside themselves.”

Maggie O’Farrell, Jessie Buckley, Paul Mescal and Chloé Zhao at the Irish premiere of Hamnet. Picture: Andres Poveda

Zhao’s film brings out the very best in Buckley and Mescal, who are sublime together, delivering empathetic work in a tale of love, loss, and the human experience. The final half hour, in particular, where Agnes watches the play for the first time at the Globe Theatre, will be remembered for years to come. Buckley is moved that the film is resonating so strongly with audiences.

“I’m incredibly proud of this film, and I’m so proud that it’s being responded to the way it is, and that it is being recognised. The personal effect and having to actually contain that for people — that’s it for me. That for me is the greatest feeling.”

Working with Mescal on the film, she says, has been “an incredibly significant collaboration” in her life. “I think he has been such a solid container and team collaborator with me, somebody that I was meeting in absolute equality, and there was so much care, trust, which allowed danger. Potential to fall off the edge of the cliff, to be in an absolute unknowable together.” Mescal is on a short trip home for the Irish premiere from London, where he is playing Paul McCartney in Sam Mendes’ four interconnected films about The Beatles.

“Going from playing a gladiator to William Shakespeare to The Beatles — that takes a very special man and human to be able to fill those spaces, because these are people,” says Buckley.

Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal in a scene from ‘Hamnet’.

“They’re not just on a pedestal — Paul McCartney has touched a million people with his stories. Shakespeare has touched people throughout his lifetime and past his lifetime, forever, and that takes a very special heart.

“He just is a movie star, and I mean that with the most admiration and love — the coat just fits him. It’s no mean feat to be able to inhabit that space as a giant and also have the heart of a human — that is as full — inside that space too.”

One of just three women — and the first woman of colour — to win a Best Director Oscar (for Nomadland), Chloé Zhao has cast wisely in her two leads, and wanted Buckley and Mescal to be part of Hamnet from the very early stages. Teaming with an Irish writer, it is notable, too, that several Irish actors — including David Wilmot, Justine Mitchell, and Derry Girls star Louisa Harland — all appear in key supporting roles.

Zhao says she has long felt a connection to this country and its people — with Buckley quipping to the filmmaker: “Get that Irish air into your lungs,” as they start their interview.

“I have a shamanic teacher — she’s Irish, and I’ve worked with her for over 17 years now,” says Zhao. “I’ve been celebrating the Wheel of the Year, Celtic holidays more than the agrarian holidays. I always felt very close to this culture. And partially, I think it’s because the Roman Empire never got really far enough, and there’s still something very old preserved in the water, in the land, and the people who are up here still have that connection in their DNA.”

She felt she had found her Agnes, says Zhao, when she watched the Killarney actress in her Oscar-nominated role in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s directorial feature debut, The Lost Daughter. Buckley and Gyllenhaal will reunite for next spring’s The Bride, about the Bride of Frankenstein.

Zhao says in The Lost Daughter she saw a rare quality in Buckley’s portrayal.

“I have a super power, a sometimes unfortunate power, which is I can see through these people’s eyes, whether they’re there or not, whether they’re truly open.

“I can see her through the screen. That’s very rare, because that’s a choice, whether that person has got big enough a heart to allow the world in. They’re not afraid of their own depth.

“Jessie has that kind of primal, old power behind her, whether she knows or not. It’s there holding her so then she feels strong enough to let the windows of her soul open to the world.”

Buckley’s creativity was first fostered at her family home near Killarney’s Mangerton Mountain, where dad Tim loved writing poetry and telling stories. Her mother Marina Cassidy — a harpist, vocalist, and music therapist — was an early inspiration. Buckley joined Killarney Musical Society and was aged just 18 when she finished as runner up in I’d Do Anything, a reality-TV show contest to find Nancy for a West End production of Oliver!

A stage career followed but the actress was also getting cast for TV and film roles, appearing opposite Tom Hardy in Taboo and Johnny Flynn in Beast.

Her role as a working-class Glaswegian with a dream of going to Nashville in the delightful Wild Rose showed her musical as well as acting talents. In 2022, she recorded an album — For All the Days That Tear the Heart — with Bernard Butler.

Other roles have included Charlie Kaufman’s I’m Thinking of Ending Things and last year’s comedy-drama Wicked Little Letters.

Her achievements have made her one of our best-known international talents — but bringing a project home to Ireland is always a special experience, she says, hours before she is warmly welcomed at Hamnet’s Irish premiere.

“Any time I touch down it’s like the smell of Ireland that makes me go: ‘Oh God, yeah, I’m home’,” she says. “The warmth of people — I think we want to feel each other in Ireland. I think we really demand connection.”