6 days ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Jessie Buckley Goes Where Few Actresses Dare
THE NIGHT BEFORE I saw the movie 'Hamnet' in May, I dreamed that I lost the baby I was carrying at the very end of my pregnancy. It was harrowing but not totally surprising. I was in fact pregnant, and the film, which will be released in November and which I'd been planning to see for weeks, is about the death of a child. Based on the Northern Irish writer Maggie O'Farrell's 2020 novel of the same name, it's a fictionalized account of how William Shakespeare and his wife — who in this version is Agnes, an herbalist said to be the daughter of a forest witch — grapple with the loss of their son, Hamnet, to the plague. As its star, the Irish actress Jessie Buckley, later said to me, it's 'a pretty brutal one to watch while you're pregnant.'
When we dream, our bodies experience the emotions of our unconscious selves almost as acutely as if we were awake. It's a nightly suspension of disbelief that allows even the least imaginative person to act out fictional scenes with startling intensity. But the real trick, of course, is to pull off this illusion while awake: to perform an event you've never experienced with the immediacy of real life. For an actor, that requires craft. To maintain the fantasy, they must pretend they're not being watched, whether by cameras or audiences, but they must also — or at least, the very best actors do — compel their viewers to feel what they are feeling, no matter how much those witnesses might rather turn away.
In 'Hamnet,' when Agnes realizes that, despite all her efforts, her son is no longer breathing, she releases a wrenching, full-bodied scream, filmed from the side so that we can see the sound erupting from her mouth, then dissolving into silence, her lips still straining, as if her grief is ultimately unutterable. Buckley's performance of loss, here and in the rest of the film, seems to draw from some dark place where every parent's worst nightmare has pooled. Her scream is both unfathomable and instantly recognizable, a reminder of the potential for tragedy that lies just beneath the surface of life.
More than any other quality, it's this ability — to peel back that veneer and enter the places we'd rather not go — that has earned Buckley a reputation for playing complicated roles with devastating power. Chloé Zhao, the director of 'Hamnet,' says that as soon as she read the book, which she adapted with O'Farrell, she knew the role had to be Buckley's. Few other actresses of her generation can gain access to such a wide spectrum of emotions, or seem as willing to risk being disliked for exploring the tougher ones. 'She has no fear in terms of how she's perceived,' says Paul Mescal, 29, who plays Shakespeare in the film. 'She's never trying to hide or draw lines.' In 'Hamnet,' she is part earth mother, tending bees with muddy fingernails and giving birth in the roots of a tree, and part practical parent and partner, revealing with barely perceptible gestures — a searching stare, a terse response — the tug between her own mourning, the small daily tasks of child rearing and her anger at her husband's seeming absence after their son's death.
Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
