When Acting Is More Than a Career

New York Times

21 hours ago

These days, being an actor — especially if you're a woman, especially if you're an American woman — isn't just about acting. You have to also be a marketer (of yourself, of a product). Ideally, you should also be an entrepreneur. You should express your politics intelligently, but you should be prepared for public opinion to turn on you for doing so in a way that doesn't feel authentic or sounds too strident, or for choosing the wrong issues altogether. Acting itself is no longer the end goal of your career — it's a gateway to being a director or founding a production company. Acting is your way into a different life, not life itself.
This is increasingly true for young actors everywhere, but it's perhaps less so in the U.K. There, for both business and cultural reasons, even internationally known and commercially successful actors are expected to make regular appearances in plays; you're more likely to see them turning up in strange, low-budget or otherwise unconventional TV or film roles. Many of them are graduates of the country's storied acting schools, where Shakespeare is emphasized and theater is prioritized. Actors are among the U.K.'s greatest exports; Hollywood and Broadway would be lesser places without them.
But even in this context, the London-based Irish actress Jessie Buckley stands out for her diversity of roles and singularity of spirit. At 35, she skipped over the ingénue phase, choosing instead a series of indefinable, distinct characters marked not by their looks or sympathy but by their sincerity and sense of wounded, tender pride — a nuclear fallout survivor in the 2019 mini-series 'Chernobyl'; a dissenter in a close-knit Mennonite community in the 2022 movie 'Women Talking'; and the impassioned, fragile Sally Bowles in the 2021 London production of 'Cabaret.' 'There are threads that connect [her] performances,' writes T's digital director, Alice Newell-Hanson, in her profile of the actress. 'Buckley allows her characters to be prickly with unresolved tension — between individual and family, abandon and care, creativity and responsibility.'
In the coming months, Buckley will have two starring roles in anticipated films: first as Shakespeare's wife in 'Hamnet,' and then as the titular character in 'The Bride,' a remake of the 1935 film 'Bride of Frankenstein.' When Newell-Hanson met her in May, she was also 33 weeks pregnant with her first child. Her life is about to change.
But one senses that, no matter what, she'll continue to chart her own course, and that her ambitions will remain her own as well: a performer who lives to perform. 'Life is magical and mercurial,' she says. To watch her onscreen or onstage is to believe that too.
Hair by Orlando Pita at Home Agency. Makeup by Francelle Daly for Love Craft Beauty. Set design by Patience Harding at New School Rep