Chernobyl star Jessie Buckley on keeping it real in Hollywood

Jessie Buckley rocks up to a pavement table at an organic deli in Westbourne Grove, all battered Converse, faded denim jacket, well-worn polka-dot summer dress, headscarf and pragmatic shoulder bag, wondering what the hell she’s doing in a place like this.

For one thing, the actress, originally from County Kerry, is now an east Londoner, more used to cycling or ‘looking sweaty running badly round the park’ near her flatshare between London Fields and Bethnal Green. And despite an already glorious 2019, encompassing can’t-take-your-eyes-off-her performances in Wild Rose, Chernobyl and the imminent Judy — plus upcoming projects with Keira Knightley, Chris Rock, Robert Downey Jr and Benedict Cumberbatch — the 29-year-old is emphatically not a Notting Hill-hanging posho celeb.

This reality TV survivor and RADA-trained eldest of five, born to a musician mum and poetry-writing barman dad, is, she shrugs, just a ‘ginger Irish girl’. She moved to London at 17 to perform for its own, life-affirming sake. Fame, success and Hollywood are not her bag. ‘It’s not important to me.’ She is, per her WhatsApp handle, Messy Jessie. And she’s happy — or, as she’d put it in her thick Irish accent, ‘fockin’ happy’ — about it. 

That may all be true, yet how long her ‘normal status’ can last is less certain. This is a woman who was as compelling as a Soviet firefighter’s wife in Chernobyl, the year’s most talked about TV show, as she was leading from the front in Wild Rose, the critically acclaimed Brit-flick about a Glaswegian jailbird single mum with a belting voice and a crushing passion to make it as a country and western singer. Her next trick will be in Judy, the keenly anticipated, London-set biopic of Judy Garland’s final days, in which Buckley plays the young production assistant tasked with shepherding the fading diva, played by Renée Zellweger, on to the West End stage.

By 1968, the 46-year-old one-time child star was a gaunt, twitchy, boozy shadow of her former self, reduced to singing for envelopes of cash, chewed up and spat out by a studio system that had her on diet pills and 18-hour days from adolescence. In the film, as she seeks one last hurrah in front of the jewellery-rattlers at The Talk of the Town in Leicester Square. Six months later she was dead, succumbing to an overdose of barbiturates in Belgravia.

Working with Zellweger was a revelation, says Buckley. ‘She’d come on-set in the morning, have her little hat on, her tracksuit, say “hey babe”, go into the make-up chair, always the same. Then when she came out of the chair, she was just on it. I was like: “F*** me, she’s so brilliant, so powerful.”’ The artist formerly known as Bridget Jones, too, can’t get enough of the Buckley. ‘We had a lot of fun,’ she has said. ‘I always hate to admit that because it sounds like you weren’t working, but we had a lot of fun! She’s fantastic and so talented, too.’

Mutual adoration has extended beyond the set. ‘Renée has been such an absolute babe. We both love Susan Tedeschi,’ Buckley says of the American roots singer, ‘and she’s like: “She’s playing next week, why don’t you come over?” Yeah, she’s been lovely. She was really kind — even some mornings in the trailer, she’d show this really warm, protective heart. Just little things, looking out for me on the film.’ She says it quietly, opting to keep those private moments, well, private.

Also falling into that category is any discussion of former boyfriend James Norton, her War and Peace co-star. ‘Ah, I prefer not to talk about that!’ she says, her ready laugh bursting from her again. ‘You just make choices. My private life is very normal. I live with a group of friends, I go buy milk…’ The shooting-star status of this Bafta nominee and 2018 British Independent Film Awards Most Promising Newcomer ‘hasn’t encroached on my life, so far. I can only imagine how horrible it must be if that’s your life.’

Is she in a relationship right now? ‘Ahhhh…’ She shrugs, tilts her head back, smiles widely and says nothing. Privacy, she insists, is ‘doable. No one knows about Olivia Colman, or Ben Whishaw. People look at their work. People whose work I love, I don’t care what they’re doing in their private life.’

She’s more forthcoming about her struggles with anxiety, stress and panic attacks in her teenage years, when she attended a convent school. 

‘It’s definitely better,’ she says. ‘But I’m still human. I still have days when I get sad. And I get days when I get happy, and I get days when I get scared. But now I feel the things. I’m not frightened of them. And actually they’re all important. You’ve just got to accept them, invite them in and say, ‘Have a cup of tea and what’s going on?’, instead of trying to repress them. Which I probably did when I was young, ’cause I was scared of them.’ In any case, therapy, which she does ‘when I can’, helps. ‘It’s harder [to do] when you’re away filming, because you have to build that relationship up. But I bloody love it. It’s been brilliant for me. It’s about being honest. There’s no point pretending. If I don’t do that in my own life, how the hell am I meant to play somebody else’s?’

On the evidence of her upcoming roles, it’s clearly working. And there is literally no stopping her over the next few months. There’s Ironbark, also based on a true story, about a British businessman (Benedict Cumberbatch) spying for MI6 against the Russians at the height of the Cold War. Buckley plays his wife. And then Misbehaviour, about the protest by ‘women’s libbers’ (as they were dubbed then) at the 1970 Miss World competition in London. In another real-life role, she plays a ‘badass with dyed purple curly hair and biker boots’ who converts Knightley’s character to the cause. ‘Keira’s just awesome. So down-to-earth, so normal, a real strong woman, a feminist at heart.’ Buckley also has two American films under her belt. One is undoubtedly weird — I’m Thinking of Ending Things, the latest from alt-auteur Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich) — while the other, The Voyage of Doctor Dolittle, in which she plays Queen Victoria opposite Downey Jr, is indisputably mainstream.

Then, from this October, Buckley will be back on set, in Chicago, shooting the next instalment of the brilliant anthology series Fargo with Rock and Whishaw.

‘I’m looking forward to relocating for six months,’ she says, eyes shining. ‘Sometimes it’s hard, but I’ve had a bit of time to get hungry again. And I’m ready for an adventure.’

Talk about range. Talk about diversity. As Anthony Lane, The New Yorker’s film critic, noted of Buckley in his review of Wild Rose: ‘She is a specialist in the untamed.’ When I relate this to her, the laughter explodes. ‘I’m going to have that on my tombstone! I’m quite happy with that.’ This, then, is her moment, and this is the gloriously unpredictable career of Jessie Buckley. 

‘Judy’ will be released in early October. ‘Wild Rose’ is out now on DVD, Blu-Ray and VOD.