Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal were both nominated for Golden Globes for their ‘astonishing performances’ in Hamnet, Chloé Zhao’s adaptation of Irish author Maggie Farrell’s 2020 novel about the death of Shakespeare’s young son.
Buckley plays Agnes, the Bard’s wife, while Mescal portrays William Shakespeare. Both are excellent – as was seen at the film’s Dublin premiere, which they both attended.
The fictional drama is based in fact, as one of Shakespeare’s three children did die aged 11 in 1596. A few years later, Hamlet debuted at the Globe Theatre, with the film explaining that the names Hamnet and Hamlet were virtually interchangeable in England at the time.
With Buckley nominated for Best Female Actor and Mescal for Best Male Actor in a Motion Picture (Drama) it seems Ireland has a chance of scooping a Globe, especially as both performances have received critical acclaim.
The American Film Institute listed Hamnet as one of the top ten films of 2025 while it also won the People’s Choice Award at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Jessie’s career so far
In Hamnet, Buckley and Mescal are mesmeric, sharing a chemistry that lends their roles a devastating emotional impact. Not to diminish Mescal’s work but Buckley’s performance has been singled out as ‘revelatory and heroic’.
The film travels from the couple’s early romance and family life to how mourning their lost child drives them apart with its overwhelming intensity.
The 35-year-old, who relishes what she has called ‘the shadow bits’ of human experience, really sinks her teeth into the role of the grieving mother and delivers a tour de force that is raw and vivid.
Referred to as the acting world’s ‘best kept secret’, it isn’t that Buckley hasn’t received recognition – she has Academy Award, BAFTA and Olivier nominations – but she is not a huge star. This may be because she is a chameleon who disappears into parts, and guards her anonymity and privacy furiously.
While she married in 2023, she never revealed her husband’s surname, referring to him simply as Freddie, and neither has she revealed the name of their little girl, born earlier this year. She debuted her bump at Cinema Con in April but has been tight-lipped since.
The couple live between Norfolk and Dalston, East London, but that is all we know of their domestic life, except that she has described the experience of parenthood as ‘transformative’.
Born in December 1989 in Killarney to Marina Cassidy and Tim Buckley, she is the eldest of five siblings and has always loved music. She attended the Ursuline Convent in Thurles, where her mother was a vocal coach, and won roles in school musicals including Tony in West Side Story. She suffered from depression as a teen and has credited music as saving her.
Buckley first came to public attention in the 2008 BBC talent show I’d Do Anything, created to find a new Nancy for a revival of Oliver. While she didn’t win, it launched her career. Afterwards, she made her West End debut in Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music, directed by Trevor Nunn.
She subsequently attend RADA and graduated with a BA in Acting in January 2013. After studying Shake- spearean drama at RADA, she then went on to roles by the playwright including Miranda in The Tempest, Kate opposite Jude Law in Henry V and Perdita in The Winter’s Tale.
Roles in TV soon followed with War and Peace (2016) and Taboo (2017). On the former she met James Norton, who she dated for two years until 2018. Other TV roles and positive reviews followed with The Woman in White (2018), Chernobyl (2019) and Fargo (2020). The Kerry woman also featured on Forbes’s 30 Under 30 list in 2019.
She made her film debut in The Beast (2017), a dark psychological drama, but it was her next film Wild Rose (2018), in which she played a spiky, aspiring country singer, which was her breakthrough, securing her a BAFTA nomination. The part, which allowed her to display both her singing and acting skills, was a perfect vehicle and garnered her industry attention.
2021 was also a productive year, with a role in The Lost Daughter, an adaptation of an Elena Ferrante novel, snagging her another BAFTA nomination and an Academy Award nod for Best Supporting Actress. That same year she was asked by Freddie Redmayne to play the part of
Sally Bowles on stage in Cabaret, a role which won her the Laurence Olivier Best Actress in a Musical in 2022. Despite such a busy schedule, she also managed to release an album with Bernard Butler titled For All Our Days That Tear The Heart the same year, which was nominated for the Mercury Music Prize.
More films followed with Women Talking (2022) and Wicked Little Letters (2023) displaying Buckley’s enviable range, which can pivot from the darkest drama to black comedy with ease. Now with Hamnet she has found a complex part that really highlights that extraordinary talent.
In explaining her process portraying Agnes, she has lauded her chemistry with co-star Mescal, ‘which allowed us to go wherever we needed to go’ as both explore people broken by grief.
Currently on Elle’s Women In Hollywood cover, it seems that Buckley’s moment has come. Her next role is as Frankenstein’s bride opposite Christian Bale in a punkish re-imagining of the tale set in 1930s Chicago. Always drawn to the ‘flaws and foibles of people’ she is clearly relishing the complexity of her current characters.
‘Ideally when you play a character, she goes away with half of you, and you with half of her, and you learn something,’ Buckley has said.
Another thing she learned is that she and Mescal have a very close creative bond. ‘I absolutely adore that man,’ she has said, and the feeling is mutual.
Paul’s career so far
Unlike Buckley, however, Mescal’s ascent to film stardom over the past five years has been swift. His initial debut as Connell Waldron in Normal People (2020) transfixed a literally captive audience at the time and made him the nation’s favourite object of desire.
It also won him a BAFTA for Best Actor in a TV series and an Emmy nomination. The 5ft11 Kildare man, who is not yet 30, has proved since that he can convey a range of emotions but is especially adept at male vulnerability. It is a talent that he draws on extensively playing Shakespeare in Hamnet.
Born in February 1996, in Maynooth, to parents Dearbhla, a guard, and Paul Mescal, a teacher who acted semi-professionally, he has a younger sister Nell, a gifted singer, and a brother Donnacha. It was a happy home, where creativity and music were encouraged.
Mescal played minor Under-21 GAA football with some skill as a defender but gave up the sport after a broken nose and jaw injury.
He performed on stage for the first time aged 16 as the lead in The Phantom Of The Opera, an adrenaline rush that propelled him towards choosing acting as his career. He studied at The Lir Academy, Trinity College, graduating in 2017 with an agent already secured.
He then embarked on a series of stage roles in The Great Gatsby and The Lieutenant Of Inishmore at the Gate, Asking For It by Louise O’Neill at the Abbey, A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream at the Kilkenny Arts Festival, and The Plough And The Stars at the Lyric in London. He moved to London in 2020, post-Normal People, becoming a target for the tabloids, who famously papped him in his short GAA shorts, showing off his fine muscular legs.
He made his film debut in The Lost Daughter – which also featured Buckley – and appeared that same year in God’s Creatures as Emily Watson’s son, who has committed a sexual assault. He then played the lead in Aftersun (2022) a bittersweet tale of a troubled father on holiday with his young daughter. His portrayal won him numerous plaudits and a Best Actor Nomination from the Academy Awards. Not bad for your third film.
That same year, he also starred in a modern musical remake of Carmen as Aidan, the diva’s doomed lover. In 2023, he completed All Of Us Strangers, with fellow Irish actor Andrew Scott, a romantic fantasy about a man who appears to timetravel to his childhood home while embarking on a relationship with his neighbour. It received glowing reviews and the pair remain firm friends. Another film, Foe, a science fiction story with Saoirse Ronan, was less well received.
However, in 2022, Mescal drew plaudits for the role of Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire on stage in London’s West End. His performance was described as ‘riveting’, ‘electric’ and ‘furious’ by critics and won him a Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actor.
He had been intimidated taking on the iconic role, made famous by Marlon Brando, but showed that he could play against his own gentle giant persona with a raw depiction of latent male aggression.
Mescal’s disarming sleepy-eyed charm combined with his acting chops was gaining him a growing reputation, but it was still a major coup when he was announced in 2023 to play Lucius Verus in Ridley Scott’s sequel to Gladiator. He undertook a regime of strength training, fight choreography, horse training and show fighting in preparation and while he received positive reviews it was generally judged that the original film was superior.
Regardless, Mescal had proved his ability to helm a major film and also won the Academy’s Vantage Award for Emerging Artists that year.
This year, Mescal also stars in The History Of Sound opposite Josh O’Connor, a tragic love affair which received a six-minute ovation at Cannes.
He has secured too the role of Paul McCartney in Sam Mendes’s four part Beatles series of films and is currently learning to play the guitar as a left-hander for authenticity.
As a bona fide ‘heart throb’, as per the New York Times, Mescal’s love life has received a lot of attention. He dated singer Phoebe Bridgers from 2020 to 2022, appearing in her video Saviour Complex.
Since 2024, he has been seeing another singer, Gracie Abrams, daughter of director JJ, and is extremely protective of their relationship. His vast base of adoring fans are devastated that he remains a serial monogamist.
While he has appeared on the covers of the Hollywood Reporter, GQ and Rolling Stone, and is an ambassador for fashion brand Gucci, Mescal remains endearingly level-headed and low-key.
‘I didn’t know actors growing up, actors didn’t come from Maynooth,’ he has said.
Now, a Golden Globe may be a prospect for the Kildare native less than a decade after leaving drama school.
If it could be as a double victory with Buckley, that would be as poetic as any Shakespearean sonnet.
