The Oscar nominee — who stars in next weekend’s “The Bride!” — tells EW about shooting the two movies back to back, and why she “wasn’t okay” the first time she watched “Hamnet.”

Jessie Buckley explains why playing the Bride of Frankenstein before filming Hamnet ended up being an unexpected ‘gift’

The Oscar nominee — who stars in next weekend's "The Bride!" — tells EW about shooting the two movies back to back, and why she "wasn't okay" the first time she watched "Hamnet."

By Gerrad Hall

Gerrad Hall is an editorial director at **, overseeing movie, awards, and music coverage. He is also host of *The Awardist* podcast, and has cohosted EW's live Oscars, Emmys, SAG, and Grammys red carpet shows. He has appeared on *Good Morning America*, *The Talk*, *Access Hollywood*, *Extra!*, and other talk shows, delivering the latest news on pop culture and entertainment.

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February 26, 2026 1:41 p.m. ET

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Jessie Buckley in 'Hamnet'. Credit:

Agata Grzybowska / FOCUS FEATURES

Jessie Buckley was "not okay" the first time she watched *Hamnet*, where she plays Agnes Hathaway, a wife and mother of three who experiences enormous grief after her 11-year-old son dies following a brief illness— blaming herself for not being able to save him with her natural remedies of plants and tinctures that made her a known herbalist and healer in her village.

"I saw it for the first time when I was eight months pregnant," she recalls on **'s *The Awardist* podcast. It was just her in sound mixer Johnnie Burn's studio. "Which is a wild. I had like two heartbeats going on inside me, and there was so much about motherhood and birth and family. I was not okay. I was crying."

She's not the only one. The film has struck a deep emotional chord with audiences in its telling of how the death of young Hamnet inspired Agnes's husband, William Shakespeare (Paul Mescal), to write what is arguably his greatest work, *Hamlet* — what she eventually discovers is a living memorial to their son.

Jessie Buckley as Agnes and Joe Alwyn as Bartholomew in 'Hamnet'.

Agata Grzybowska/Focus Features

Even though Buckley knew what was coming — she stars in the movie, after all, and filmed all of those emotional scenes, which have catapulted her to the top — she says watching it was different than filming it.

"I don't think you even know what you're doing fully when you're filming it," she says, laughing. "You just have a feeling of something, and I'm not somebody who watches playback or wants to know [how things look]. What I love about film and what I love about making films is that it's never one person's story. And actually, by the time a film is finished and it has gone through so many hands and people, and so many people have had responses to it already, it becomes something bigger than you. It becomes a kind of communal expression. And to see all the nuances, the music and scenes of Paul's that I hadn't seen before... it is different than when you film it by the nature that it belongs to so many people."

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Still, it's Buckley's performance that audiences are so enraptured with — at first mysterious, then commanding yet tender as she becomes a wife and mother, followed by the devastation that comes with her horrific loss, but still remaining a steady, guiding, and present force for her two children as William escapes to London to work on the play and grieve in his own way. Her work has earned her nearly every award imaginable this season, including a Golden Globe, BAFTA, and Critics Choice Best Actress honors, with SAG's Actor Awards and the Oscars still to come.

Two weeks prior to the start of rehearsals for *Hamnet*, though, Buckley was playing a very different woman: the Bride of Frankenstein in Maggie Gyllenhaal's *The Bride!* (in theaters March 6).

"I was very nervous about that. I was like, it's a jump. *The Bride* is like having your hands in an electrical current, that's got petrol running through it, and you're just, like, soaring on acid. You're just in another stratosphere of life," she explains. "And then *Hamnet*'s, like putting your hands into clay and Earth."

Jesse Buckley in 'The Bride!'.

Warner Bros. Pictures

Buckley showed up to the set of Chloé Zhao's *Hamnet* with "bleached eyebrows, peroxide-bleached hair, and the whole production saw my eyebrows had fallen out as well," she recalls. The Irish actress says she was "so woken up in *Bride* and also cracked wide open," so she had to figure out a way to use it to her advantage.

"I think the truth about however you enter any film is, you've gotta enter it exactly where you are. And I just was like, 'Chloe, this is like where I'm coming into this river. This is how I discover who this woman is,'" she says. "I love that my muscles were so worked from filming of *Bride*. My creative muscles were susceptible to being on a set, so it actually was a gift because I just kept on going, you know? *How brave do I dare to be*? For me, I don't wanna *act*. I wanna *be*. You're always trying to find that conversation with your character, with 50 percent of yourself and 50 percent of the world that you're about to enter."

***Check out more from EW's *****The Awardist*****, featuring exclusive interviews, analysis, and our podcast diving into all the highlights from the year's best in TV, movies, and more.***

You can listen to Buckley's full interview on *The Awardist* below, where she also shares why she was afraid she'd curse herself if she didn't watch her *Winter's Tale* costar Judi Dench's performance each night from the theatre wings, how her hawk in *Hamnet* proved to be a complicated costar one day, why she wanted Emily Watson to play her mother-in-law, and more.

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