Jessie Buckley Never Stops Learning

---

If Jessie Buckley were more like the woman she portrays in her latest film, Wild Rose, she’d be a hot-blooded 23-year-old ex-con from Glasgow with two kids, white cowboy boots, and an obsession with becoming a country music star. Buckley, instead, is from Ireland. She has a calm demeanor, tightly coiled red hair, and a love of poetry (Anne Sexton lately), and is living what she calls a “pretty normal” life. What she and Rose-Lynn Harlan do share is a powerful singing voice—Buckley performed all the songs on the soundtrack herself. And as it turns out, probably more than that, since Buckley aims to learn from every one of her roles. “I never look at [a script] and go ‘Oh, that’s me, thank God!’” she says. As a rule, she keeps herself open to having her mind changed. “When you start digging into a world, you can’t help but let it sink into your normal day-to-day life. Everything begins to be tinted with it. You really grow because of it,” she says. “With every character—every woman—that’s come into my life, it’s changed how I feel about the world. That’s what’s really exciting.”

From Wild Rose’s firecracker of a leading lady, the 29-year-old Buckley, who can also currently be seen in HBO’s striking miniseries Chernobyl, says she learned more than usual. The film follows Rose-Lynn after she’s released from prison as she straddles the freedom of youth (and her dream of escaping to Nashville as a country music singer with it) and the reality of her life: being the single parent to her two children, working as a wealthy housewife’s daily woman, and dealing with the repercussions that follow her time spent in prison. “Rose-Lynn had much more tenacity and courage than I did,” Buckley says. “The boundaries she was trying to get through were much thicker than anything I had experienced in my life.”

Throughout Wild Rose, Rose-Lynn is so fiercely set on the things she wants for herself that nothing seems to be able to hold her down for long, even when it should. Take tricking her neighbors into watching her children for days in a row so that she can practice with her band when she has an opportunity to perform, for example. Or breaking into her employer’s liquor cabinet for a drink while on the job. “I didn’t want to sheen her up in any way, I didn’t want to present her as somebody who was perfect,” Buckley explains. “If anything, I wanted to get down and dirty with her—expose all her vulnerabilities and mess-ups and the reality of what it is to be a woman and a mother and a dreamer.” It works, because Rose-Lynn feels as real a person as anyone you’ve ever met; more so, even, because she’s so clearly just herself. “She also taught me to fuck shit up, man!” Buckley laughs. “She’s naughty. She’s a rebel and she’s a dreamer. To want something for yourself is scary and what she realizes along the way is that it’s not black and white.”

Buckley grew up in Kerry, Ireland, as one of five children. She says her parents raised her not to fear mistakes; there is too much life to experience. Some of those experiences started for Buckley on the BBC talent show I’d Do Anything, in which the then-eighteen-year-old was the runner-up to play Nancy in the musical Oliver! on the West End. She had originally wanted to attend drama school, but didn’t get in; instead, after the show, she got a job “by accident” as Anne Egerman in a revival of Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music. After thirteen months there, she sang jazz for two years before returning to school at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, from which she graduated in 2013. Now, as she emerges from the woodwork as a pure, genuine talent, her “pretty normal” life is riding her bicycle all over London, where she lives, looking “generally a bit homeless,” cooking with her friends, and drinking a lot of wine. She doesn’t bother hiding how very much she loves her family and exudes a peacefulness that’s starting to feel rare among others under the age of thirty. This attitude might be due to her upbringing: She’s not too concerned with perfection. “The vulnerabilities are the best parts” of a person, she says. “I think we need more of that.”

Perhaps it’s this ability to embrace vulnerability that makes Buckley such a convincing actress. Her approach seems to be to follow the same immersive learning process she did with Wild Rose for every role she takes. “I suppose I just want to drown my head in whatever world I’m going into as much as I can,” she speculates. Prior to Rose, which will be in theaters this June after premiering at the Tribeca Film Festival, she filmed Johan Renck’s recently released HBO miniseries Chernobyl, in which Buckley stars alongside Emily Watson and Stellan Skarsgård as Lyudmilla Ignatenko, the wife of a firefighter. Her husband was one of the first responders to the initial nuclear incident. Naturally, Chernobyl carries a different kind of weight. “I felt responsible because she is a real woman who’s still alive,” Buckley explains about Lyudmilla. On top of that, “the story is real and the story is still alive—and the consequences of the story are still alive.”

Those consequences speak to what Chernobyl is widely about; according to Buckley, it’s pride. “Pride cost people their lives, thousands and thousands of lives,” she says. Thirty years later, not much is widely known about the disaster, yet lives in Ukraine are still affected by the incident, the full impact of which has never been, and probably never will be, categorically confirmed. And with their prime minister’s blessing, the Ukrainian people have returned to farm in that part of the country while the land remains poisoned with radiation. Chernobyl, which is brilliantly acted, powerfully moving, and grippingly honest, explores how such a disaster—an avoidable one—might have happened at all. On a personal level, Buckley seems intent on wholly portraying Lyudmilla, but she is also aware of how nuanced the reality is. “This experience of these people from Chernobyl is so unique. It’s not quite like a war,” she says. “It’s like a silent war that killed forty-five thousand people. You just want to make it as human as you can.” Does she think she did Lyudmilla justice? “Oh, I don’t know,” she says. “That’s not up to me.”

Both Wild Rose and Chernobyl—along with her appearance in this fall’s forthcoming biopic Judy, which stars Renée Zellweger as Judy Garland—follow Buckley’s breakout performance in the 2017 thriller Beast, in which she portrayed a woman whose lover is accused of murder. While filming Beast, she says, “I felt plugged into something really fun,” not only because of how much she loved working with costar Johnny Flynn and the film’s director Michael Pearce, but because of the complexities of the subject matter, with so much to interpret.

A psychological character study that’s part tender love story and part murder mystery, the film follows Buckley’s Moll as she meets and falls in love with Pascal, an outsider to her small and conservative community. Given Moll’s troubled past and her learned numbness, Pascal “bounces life back into her,” Buckley says. Enough so that when he is accused of murder, Moll defends him—and even lies for him. “How can somebody who brings that much life back into somebody also kill and take life?” Buckley asks. “We’re the same” are Pascal’s last words to Moll, whose final scene leaves the viewer to wonder if he’s right. “What these two characters connect with,” Buckley elaborates, “is that they allow each other to scratch beneath the surface in a world which has cast them out. Their ‘beastliness’ exists very thinly below the level of their skin.” Making Beast, she says, had a lasting impact on her, as it’s clear all of her projects do—which is exactly how she likes it. “I felt so much energy,” she recalls. “I felt like I was being born.”

Chernobyl continues on Mondays on HBO. Wild Rose is out June 21. Judy is out September 27.