FILM INTERVIEW
Catapulting to fame over the last five years , instinctive Irish actor Jessie Buckley has wowed in films (Wild Rose, I’m Thinking of Ending Things, Men) and TV (Chernobyl, Fargo S 4). She was Oscar-nominated for The Lost Daughter, won a Laurence Olivier award for Cabaret and now she’s spewing wild profanities at Olivia Colman in hilarious period comedy Wicked Little Let ters…
J essie Buckley is telling Total Film to fuck off. ‘You’re a fucking eejit,’ she spits. Thankfully, the outburst is prompted. In the 34-year-old actor’s latest film, Wicked Little Letters, Buckley plays Rose Gooding, a rowdy Irish migrant living in the quaint English seaside town of 1920s Littlehampton. Rose, a single mum, makes eyebrows soar and curtains twitch with her foul mouth and boisterous behaviour, so is naturally the prime suspect when her pious neighbour, Edith Swan (Olivia Colman), receives anonymous letters addressing her as a ‘fucking old bag of shit’ and worse. The constant stream of inventive invective is hilarious, and attains a certain musicality when delivered in Buckley’s native brogue.
‘It’s so delicious,’ she agrees when TF apologises for embracing stereotypes but suggests that the Irish make an artform of cursing. So what’s her own favourite swear? ‘I mean, “fuck off” is pretty good,’ she grins, and it indeed sounds great when delivered with the oomph she musters. ‘“Eejit” is such a great word. It isn’t that bad but it makes me laugh. “You’re a fucking eejit.” What is that? It’s like something a leprechaun would say!’
As amusing as the super-sweary Wicked Little Letters is, it sure as fuck has something serious to say. Class and fear of the outsider come under the microscope. But most of all, words like ‘decorum’ and ‘moral rectitude’ are bandied about by male characters who make it clear that only ‘ladylike’ behaviour will suffice. Rose, of course, is having none of it, and not even an impending court case and the threat of prison can quash her spirit.
It’s a theme that has run through much of Buckley’s stellar work since she turned heads in the 2017 feature, Beast. Before then, she’d done Shakespeare on stage and Tom Harper’s War &Peace miniseries, but was primarily known for coming runner-up in I’d Do Anything, the BBC talent series geared towards finding a Nancy for the 2009 West End revival of Oliver!. With Beast, however, Buckley announced herself as a startling film talent, her Moll busting loose of the strictures of an oppressive family when she falls for Johnny Flynn’s murder suspect, Pascal. In Wild Rose, she was a Glaswegian mother determined to hold on to her dream of becoming a country star
