Jessie Buckley: ‘Women Talking’ Resonated Because “It Isn’t Just A Female Experience, It’s A Worldly Experience”

deadline.com:

When Jessie Buckley first read Sarah Polley’s script for Women Talking, it bothered her. There they were, a bunch of women sitting in a barn in the back-blocks of Canada, talking about what they were going to do with their lives: they wouldn’t let her go. “There was so much unknown within it, which was the best part of it, because it kept nagging me,” she says. “Even after I’d read the original book and met Sarah, it was something that kept just returning.

I was like, ‘Get out! Get out of my head!’” Of course, Women Talking wasn’t going anywhere. Buckley duly ended up playing Mariche, an abused wife and mother in a fundamentalist Christian community where women are not even allowed to learn to read.

Buckley shows us a woman simmering with an incipient anger she can’t even name. It is a shining performance within a strong ensemble that could well bring her a second Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress, following her nomination last year for her complex portrait of a reluctant young mother in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Lost Daughter.

All this is part of a seemingly unstoppable phenomenon. Now 32, Buckley was 17 when she left Killarney in Ireland, hoping to get into London’s Guildhall School of Music & Drama.