“When I was a teenager, there was a lot of what I felt, especially as a woman, that shouldn’t be said,” she told me. “Sometimes I felt like I was going to explode, like I was too much. There was all this feeling in me – I felt this muchand it felt like it was kept so still and tight.
What did she feel that couldn’t be said, I wanted to know, and she paused to find her words. “Woman…desire. Female hunger, female bodies, female intellect – yes, a female hunger. I felt like everyone around me was starving. And in a sense, if you went hungry, you did great. To join the world, you must starve and be smaller than yourself, and then you will be tasty. Internally I exploded.” Feeling depressed and frustrated as a teenager, she dove into old movies obsessed with Katharine Hepburn or Judy Garland. At age 17, she applied to drama school and was rejected, putting a halt to that dream.
The next day, she decided to audition for the reality talent show “I’d Do Anything”, in which young actresses compete for the role of Nancy in a West End production of the musical “Oliver!” Footage from this competition is still on YouTube, and it features teen Buckley week after week with her sparkling red curls and wide gold hoop earrings, doing something that can only be described in clichés: singing her heart out, singing for her life. Her voice was applauded, but she was repeatedly criticized for what the judges deemed overly “masculine” body language – she was coached to “be more feminine” and “put your feminine head on.” I looked back at the footage and found this assessment of her physicality bizarre, not to mention sexist. In retrospect, it seems like another expression of the kind of rigidity surrounding “savory” displays of femininity that Buckley has spent her adult life reimagining. It’s not images she seems to enjoy meeting again. She was clearly a talent – she was Andrew Lloyd Webber’s favorite – but also just a serious teenager who bravely sang one power ballad after another, with a clear voice. Yet there is a blueprint of today’s Buckley: a certain urgency that comes through in her performances. When she sings “As Long as He Needs Me,” she looks hungry, like she could swallow the whole world and it wouldn’t be enough.
While filming “The Lost Daughter” during the pandemic, Buckley developed a habit of whispering images and ideas into her ear between takes, according to Gyllenhaal. What Buckley remembers whispering the most was, “You’re starving, you’re absolutely starving.” The film is based on a novel by Elena Ferrante about an academic who abandons her young daughters to pursue a love affair and the space to write – a choice she looks back on with mixed feelings decades later. The film depicts the main character, Leda, in both eras of her life: suffocating under the weight of early motherhood and household obligations, and reflecting on her life as an elderly woman on vacation alone. The older Leda is played by Olivia Colman; Buckley plays Leda the young mother, desperately in love with her children, but even more desperate to get away from them.
The film penetrates the taboo of a mother whose needs do not match those of her children and who, faced with that conflict, chooses for herself. Leda calls herself an ‘unnatural’ mother. This self-incrimination is undermined by the tenderness and pathos with which Buckley plays her. Buckley’s Leda is tired and captive, but also playful, loving, dutiful. She opposes rogue states. She holds her children as if she never wants to let them go – until she lets them go. Who wouldn’t want what she wants – more time to think and write, to sleep with Peter Sarsgaard? Buckley said she loved the opportunity Gyllenhaal gave her to be “curious about what might be a version of what motherhood or womanhood might actually mean, not something just palatable.” The unspoken truth about what it’s like to be a woman and really take a bite of the apple. And enjoy it. And don’t apologize for it.
If there’s a common thread between Buckley’s early work, it’s her penchant for playing women who want something they shouldn’t. Her 2017 feature film debut, “Beast,” stars Buckley Moll, a twenty-something who is so desperate to get away from her controlling mother that she begins a relationship with a man she suspects is behind a string of local rape murders. of young girls. In “Wild Rose,” Often seen as her breakout role, she plays a 24-year-old Scottish woman recently released from prison who desperately wants to be a country singer in Nashville, a dream she struggles to subordinate to the needs of her two young children. In the HBO miniseries “Chernobyl,” she plays the pregnant wife of a firefighter who responds to the nuclear explosion; she chooses to be with her husband when he dies, despite warning that his body is radioactive and dangerous to her pregnancy, a choice that costs her the child. In Season 4 of the TV series ‘Fargo’, she plays a fun-loving Minnesota nurse who calls herself an “Angel of Mercy” and surreptitiously kills her patients. In a 2020 filmed production of “Romeo and Juliet” for the National Theater she plays an earthy, powerful Juliet with a mature sense of what she wants. These women may be seen by others as morally compromised – the nurse certainly is – but perhaps more importantly they intentionally collide with the most complicated aspects of human agency.
In “Men,” Buckley plays Harper, a young widow who retreats alone to a mansion in the English countryside, where she is slowly hunted—or pursued—by a series of male archetypes: a police officer who doesn’t believe her; a reverend who accuses her of arousing his lust; a silent, naked figure covered in leaves, intended to evoke the Green Man, a pagan figure with a face covered in leaves, symbolizing the cycle of life and death. For two and a half hours, Buckley is mostly alone on screen with the many men attacking her, mocking her, flashing her, lurking outside her windows, gaslighting her, blaming her. (They are all played by one actor, Rory Kinnear, with the exception of Harper’s late husband, who is played in flashbacks by Paapa Essiedu.) Among other things, the film is an allegorical recitation of all the ways men have ever mistreated women. .