Jessie Buckley is almost certainly going to win an Oscar come March. In Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet, the 36-year-old Irish industry fixture gives a no-holds-barred turn that has wowed critics and audiences the world over—winning her both a Critics Choice Award and a Golden Globe. But her story hardly started with Zhao’s moving latest film: Revisit seven of Buckley’s most compelling performances to date below.
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Beast (2017)
Buckley’s breakthrough came at the age of 27, when she joined a volatile Johnny Flynn in Michael Pearce’s stormy romantic thriller about two outcasts who collide on the rolling, windswept hills of Jersey. With incredible delicacy, intelligence, and then a fierce intensity and power, she shows us exactly what she’s made of—and was named the British Independent Film Awards’ Most Promising Newcomer.
Wild Rose (2018)
Exuberant and prickly, with the voice of an angel and an irresistible swagger, Buckley’s central creation in Tom Harper’s crowd-pleasing Glaswegian musical drama—Rose-Lynn, a single mother of two with big dreams of going to Nashville and becoming a country singer—remains one of her best yet. A BAFTA nod and even more prominent parts followed.
Chernobyl (2019)
Craig Mazin’s hair-raising reevaluation of the titular nuclear disaster is crammed full of highly impressive performances from the likes of Jared Harris, Stellan Skarsgård, and Emily Watson, but Buckley is integral, too, as the wife of a firefighter whose exposure to the catastrophe proves fatal. A civilian baffled and then horrified by all that unfolds around her, she is our eyes and ears—and as she finally grasps the true scale of what has occurred, our hearts break for her.
I’m Thinking of Ending Things (2020)
This mind-melter from Charlie Kaufman centers on an enigmatic Buckley as the conflicted girlfriend of Jesse Plemons’s awkward Jake, who takes her to meet his incredibly strange parents (Toni Collette and David Thewlis). All hell breaks loose, but it’s held together by her mesmeric, totally committed turn.
Fargo (2020)
In the ’50s Kansas City-set fourth season of Noah Hawley’s rip-roaring crime anthology, Buckley cuts a terrifying figure as a peppy nurse with a penchant for poison—proof she can play a delicious villain with the same flair she brings to loveable everywomen.
The Lost Daughter (2021)
Then came Buckley’s first Oscar nomination, for her sensitive, steely, and endlessly relatable take on a frazzled young mother struggling to stay afloat in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s nuanced meditation on the joys and heartbreaks of parenthood. If anyone still had any doubts about her abilities, this—a supporting part that felt seismic—was their answer.
Women Talking (2022)
Opposite a serene Rooney Mara and a raging Claire Foy, Buckley is a lone dissenting voice in Sarah Polley’s heart-wrenching portrait of a group of women and girls in an isolated Mennonite colony who are debating how to respond to a series of brutal attacks from the men in their community. Her explosive pivotal scene—where her walls break down and the truth spills out at last—is a masterclass.
