Jessie Buckley is one of the most fearless actresses to emerge from British and Irish film in recent years, a performer whose background in musical theater gave her a vocal and emotional range that few of her peers can match. She broke through with Wild Rose (2018), then built a run that includes Chernobyl (2019), I’m Thinking of Ending Things (2020), Fargo (2020), The Lost Daughter (2021), and Men (2022), before winning the Academy Award for Best Actress for Hamnet (2025), Chloé Zhao’s adaptation of the Maggie O’Farrell novel about Shakespeare’s family.

On screen, Buckley operates through a raw emotional openness that makes her performances feel unrehearsed even in the most demanding material, a quality Men used to harrowing effect across its final act. Her brown hair, pale features, and brown eyes give her an expressiveness that holds equally in gritty drama and the surreal territory she has increasingly gravitated toward, and her Oscar-winning turn as a grief-stricken Agnes in Hamnet showed the full range of that instrument.