While we can’t say we align on Jessie Buckley’s stance on cats, what did resonate recently was the Hamnet star’s speech when accepting the award for Best Actress in a Leading Role at the BAFTAs.
Addressing both her agent, her fellow nominees, and her daughter, Jessie Buckley celebrated the rise in roles depicting “naughty”, “disobedient” women, for which Buckley has portrayed many.
What better way to celebrate International Women’s Day, then, than to take a look at some of these radical, wild, and complex women characters she’s played and all the ways in which they reject societal binary.
Maggie Gyllenhaal's The Bride! (2026)
As of Friday, Jessie Buckley’s second film of 2026 is now out and screening at Cineworld. The Bride! sees director and writer Maggie Gyllenhaal work with Jessie Buckley once again, this time in this gothic romance that spins off of Mary Shelley’s classic novel, Frankenstein, and depicts a second creator being made to keep Frankenstein’s monster company.
Starring alongside Christain Bale’s Frank, Buckley’s character is a murdered woman who is brought back to life. While it should feel destined to all go wrong, the pair bond, and frolic through 1930s Chicago causing chaos and radical social change, all while being hotly pursued by police detective Jake Wiles (Peter Sarsgaard).
What could be more disobedient than a woman whose life trajectory defies its expectations, not least because she defies death itself with the help of Dr Cornelia Euphronious?
Agnes in Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet (2026)
Buckley’s first release of the year, and the very role that has garnered her so much critical acclaim, is her role as Agnes in Chloé Zhao’s adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s brilliant best seller, Hamnet. Not only is this a story that puts a famously celebrated man in the background, Agnes herself is a peculiar character to the community around her, shunning ideas about women being clean and bound to the house.
Agnes is in touch with the world around her and refuses to give birth at home. Instead, she follows in her mother’s footsteps and takes herself to the forest to give birth to her first child. She is staunch in her beliefs and disinterested in propriety.
Sweary Rose Gooding in Wicked Little Letters (2023)
What is more naughty than dropping a profanity here and there? That’s exactly the role Buckley takes on in Thea Sharrock’s Wicked Little Lies, in which she becomes the prime suspect when devout Christian Edith Swan (Olivia Coleman) begins receiving vile, hateful letters from a mystery sender.
The two women had once been friends. The thing that broke it? Well, Rose headbutted one of Edith’s guests at a birthday party, of course. While such brutish behaviour might be shrugged off in a man, it is undignified in a woman. Or is it? (Not that we think any kind of violence is okay, of course!)
Buckley takes on country music in Wild Rose (2018)
She’s not a one trick pony – Jessie Buckley can sing, too. And this is put to good use in Tom Harper’s Wild Rose, in which Buckley plays Rose-Lynn Harlan, an aspiring country singer who is certainly a little rough around the edges.
From Glasgow, she’s a single mother of two and we find her at the start of the film having just got out of prison for attempting to smuggle drugs. Not exactly the kind of behaviour you’d expect from a young woman – or so society says, anyway.
And that’s the thing about Jessie Buckley’s speech. It wasn’t so much about validating being violent or breaking the law or being unkind. More so, it was a celebration of there being a focus on complex female characters that don’t fit a certain role, that are allowed to be as messy and as complicated as their male counterparts.
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