One Nightstand With Jessie Buckley

In One Nightstand, celebrity readers and writers join us at The Blond in 11 Howard to discuss some of their favorite books, allowing us to learn about their tastes and lives in the process.

When Jessie Buckley arrived in Herefordshire, England, to film Hamnet, she quickly discovered there was a problem. “They put us up in a hotel on a roundabout, and it was a kind of huge conference complex,” says the 35-year-old Irish actor. “It was our first week of filming, and I remember I was on the 10th floor and my room had kind of bars across it. I was like, ‘Oh, no, I can't stay here.’” A new abode was, she decided, essential. “I found a tiny shepherd's hut in the middle of nowhere, right by a forest. My driver was driving me up, and he was like, ‘Are you going to be OK here?’ I was like, ‘Absolutely, this is totally my happy [place]. So I stayed there on my own.”

Buckley’s route to starring opposite Paul Mescal in a Chloe Zhao-directed, awards-favorite movie has been a nearly 20-year odyssey. As a Brit, I first encountered Buckley as a 17-year-old on Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 2008 BBC talent competition I’d Do Anything, in which contestants competed to play Nancy in a new production of Oliver! on the West End.

“I ended up doing this audition for I’d Do Anything as practice for my next drama school audition,” recalls Buckley. “I look back at that time with so much... ‘you are such a brave girl.’ Objectively, I don't think I'd have the courage to do that now, but I wanted to be part of telling stories and be part of a world that told stories, and I didn't have any boundaries with it. If somebody was to open up a door… I'd be like, ‘Oh yeah, what's in there?’ And sometimes it was super dangerous, and I would fall off the edge of the cliff.”

Buckley finished second on the show, but made the decision to revisit her goal of going to drama school rather than starting work. First, she did a 4-month Shakespeare course at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London. “It changed everything,” she says. “[Shakespeare] is kind of the reason that I recognized how powerful words on their own can be. Before I knew him, I thought I needed a vessel of music to fill the space of what I wanted to express in my life.”

She later returned to RADA to get the full undergraduate experience. “I wanted to go back to a place where I could be with people my own age, read plays, watch films, mess up in private, go to the pub on a Friday night and snog somebody,” she says, laughing. Upon graduating, she began booking British TV jobs, crossing into Hollywood with her role in Tom Harper’s Wild Rose in 2018. With Hamnet, an adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s bestselling novel, Buckley had the opportunity to put her classical training to good use.

“That relationship was so extraordinary to play and interesting in creating it with Paul,” she says of their collaboration, which earned them both Golden Globe nominations. The two didn’t socialize much on set because the project wasn’t, as Buckley describes it, “a very social story,” though the two formed enough of a bond that their intimate scenes felt comfortable.

“I think Maggie Gyllenhaal has been a great person with intimacy coordinators,” she says of working with the director on her upcoming film, The Bride. “She will always say, whoever you have to have an intimate scene with, tell them what you're comfortable with, what you're not comfortable with, and state it. And sometimes [with] intimacy coordinators, it can be a choreography, and... it can be useful, but I hate anything that's like, ‘and then do this.’ I need to be able to breathe in it.”

The way to do that, she argues, is by creating “trust with the person you’re working with and respect. Intimate scenes are a part of telling a story. So you choose how you're going to tell the story together, and that is your job — to tell that story as humanely as possible. And I mean, most of the time there is absolutely no [tension]. You're kind of bumbling… It’s not sexy at all. But then sometimes, you want it to crackle. You want it to be possible.”

In the book, O’Farrell is explicit about Shakespeare’s infidelity; in the film, it’s “part of our subtext,” says Buckley. “What is so strong about their relationship is that she recognizes that to love somebody is to let somebody go and that there's something bigger than us,” she says. “To have the kind of foresight to see the greatness and the landscape that lives within him, and that it needs something bigger is, I think, a very powerful way to love somebody.” It is, I argue, a longer leash than in a traditional marriage. “I think that's quite a human experience,” she says, smiling. “I don’t want to be on a leash. Or my husband to be on a leash.”

Learn more about Buckley’s favorite books below.

Buckley’s first choice is an apt one: The Complete Works of Shakespeare. “I always want [Shakespeare] by my nightstand because it’s endless,” she says. “No matter how many times you’d do one play, you'd be able to explore something more of the depth of what exists. Even just a word is eternal.”

She put much of that to work in her new movie. “[Hamnet] is an imaginative tool to take back what is known of Agnes or what has been written of Agnes,” she says of the movie, in which Shakespeare’s wife reckons with the loss of their son to the plague. “I don't believe [Shakespeare] could have written those heroines if he hadn't known a woman who is incredibly brilliant, powerful, interesting, complex, full of love and life.”

Her second pick is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, a book she read when Maggie Gyllenhaal sent her the script for [her new film.] The Bride!, out on March 6. The film sees Buckley playing the mate created for Frankenstein’s monster, played by Christian Bale. “The Bride! is a love story about two monsters and what is deemed monstrous,” says Buckley. “In any previous iteration of The Bride, the bride has never had a voice. She's born to be a mate, but she doesn't have anything. She never says anything. And in our version, Maggie has given her a lot to say.” The shoot took 12 weeks in New York and was, by her own words, “so disobedient.” “We are playing monsters,” she adds. “It's about the too muchness of life.”

In the book, Buckley was drawn to the grief she feels pulsing through the pages. “It really struck me when I read the book and when I was reading about Mary Shelley, that she was trying to create something out of the broken bits of herself, the babies that she'd lost, the fact that she'd lost a mother and that she couldn't house her own creation,” says Buckley of Shelley’s grief, which the author documented simultaneously in her journals. “In my mind, she'd made the monster out of that. And then you're faced with this creation of your brokenness, and it's almost too much for the creator that she locks it into the attic, and then that creates this epic revenge born from loneliness.”

It was helpful material for Hamnet, which Buckley went on to film immediately after. “I finished The Bride! and then I had two weeks off and went straight into Hamnet,” she recalls. “I arrived to Hamnet with bleached eyebrows and bleached blonde hair. And there were meetings about my eyebrow. Luckily, they grew back.”

Her third book is part-art book, part-essay collection. Windows on Eternity: The Paintings of Peter Birkhäuser features paintings created by Birkhäuser in response to his dreams. Each visual is twinned with words written by Jungian analyst Eva Wertenschlag-Birkhäuser, who is the late artist’s daughter. “He got to know his shadows more within his dreams and started painting his shadows, which was revealing about his consciousness, but also the collective unconscious in the worlds that he was living in,” says Buckley, who was introduced to the work by her friend Kim Gillingham, a dream coach.

Buckley now has her own practice. “I had never really been conscious of my dreams until about 10 years ago, when I started writing down my dreams. I now work with my dreams quite a lot when I film,” she says. “When I was filming [Hamnet], my dreams became [Agnes’s] language, and I was doing a journal and working from my dreams as a way of accessing her and finding a kind of language for her.”

Her fourth selection, Cassandra Speaks: When Women Are the Storytellers, the Human Story Changes by Elizabeth Lesser, was recommended to her by a Women Talking co-star. “Fran McDormand sent me that book, and I mean, obviously if she sends you a book, you're going to read it,” she says. “It was one of those books that really woke me up again, and it's a book that I gave as gifts to my female friends, my sisters, my mom. I grew up in a Catholic Ireland, and I went to convent school for five years. The book... [kind of woke me up because it]can cut made me question the stories that I have inherited in my life, and that maybe that isn't my story.”

Her final selection is Wide Sargasso Sea author Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight. “Jean Rhys is such an unspoken hero, and she was like this little pint of a woman,” says Buckley of the 1939 modernist novel. “I read a kind of autobiography about her, and she used to have a glass of champagne and a glass of whiskey in either hand. She was this tiny kind of vagabond spirit. Gertrude Stein, Hemingway, and all of them were like, ‘She's the one of our time. She actually is a genius.’ And she just never got a break.”

The book tells the story of a woman who is floating around the edges of the city while dealing with feelings of shame and bereavement for a baby she lost. “There's this kind of split person,” says Buckley. “She's in a conversation with her unconscious in it, in a kind of Fleabag way.” This lightness of touch is part of what makes the story click. “I just want more and more people to know her because she's this mighty tiny woman, and her writing's incredible,” says Buckley.

Watch the full interview below.