Sixty members of the Buckley family packed into the Arbutus Hotel in Killarney to watch one of their own make history. It was past midnight in Kerry. Jessie Buckley, 36, was standing on a stage in Los Angeles, holding an Oscar, speaking Gaelic to a billion people.
Who's Who?
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Jessie Buckley — First Irish woman to win Best Actress — and she swept every major award to get there. -
FSFreddie Sorensen — A mental health worker who met Jessie on a blind date and keeps their life fiercely private.
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CZChloé Zhao — Her first words when asked to direct Hamnet: 'Call Jessie Buckley's agent.'
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Paul Mescal — Said working with Buckley 'tore up the rule book' for everything he wanted to do next. -
Jacobi Jupe — Cast alongside his real brother Noah — one plays the dying child, the other his stage ghost. -
Maggie O'Farrell — Northern Irish-born novelist whose next book is set in post-Famine Ireland. -
Saoirse Ronan — Nominated four times, never won — Buckley finished the job Ronan started. -
TBTim Buckley and Marina Cassidy — A poet and a harpist who taught their daughter to dream — then flew to LA to watch her do it.
"I would like to dedicate this to the beautiful chaos of a mother's heart," she said. "We all come from a lineage of women who continue to create against all odds." Then she turned to her husband Freddie Sorensen, a mental health worker she'd met on a blind date in London in 2018, and said the thing that made the whole room laugh: "Fred, I love you, man. I want to have 20,000 more babies with you." They have one — Isla, born mid-2025. Sorensen, who is fiercely private, had come to the ceremony anyway.
The win made Buckley the first Irish woman in 98 years of the Academy Awards to take home Best Actress. She swept everything this season — Golden Globe, Critics' Choice, BAFTA, SAG, Oscar. A clean run. No one else came close. Her first nomination had come four years earlier, a Best Supporting Actress nod for Maggie Gyllenhaal's The Lost Daughter in 2022. That one she lost. This one she owned.
The role was Agnes Hathaway in Hamnet, Chloé Zhao's adaptation of Maggie O'Farrell's novel about Shakespeare's family and the death of his 11-year-old son. Zhao — who won Best Director herself for Nomadland in 2021 — knew immediately who she wanted. "Call Jessie Buckley's agent," she told Gold Derby, describing her first reaction when approached about the project. She used meditation, somatic exercises, and dance to draw out the performances. The film earned eight nominations. It won exactly one.
Paul Mescal, the Irish actor from Maynooth who plays Shakespeare opposite Buckley, put it simply. "I absolutely adore her, and I felt so safe with her," he told the Irish Examiner. "Working with her tore up the rule book for everything that I wanted to do moving forward." Asked about their on-screen chemistry, he didn't overthink it: "If Jessie was from the North Pole, I would have chemistry with her." The title role of young Hamnet went to Jacobi Jupe, 12, whose older brother Noah Jupe plays Hamlet in the film's play-within-a-play — a deliberate choice by Zhao, pairing real brothers as the doomed child and his stage avatar.
Buckley's parents were in the audience. Tim Buckley, a hotel bar manager and published poet from Killarney. Marina Cassidy, a classical harpist, soprano, and vocal coach. Ireland reportedly helped fund the family's travel to Los Angeles. In her speech, Jessie thanked them directly: "Mom, dad, thank you for teaching us to dream, and to never be defined by expectation, but to carve from your own passion."
She closed with "Go raibh maith agaibh, slán" — and then accidentally wished viewers a happy Mother's Day "in the UK" rather than Ireland, which generated exactly the kind of minor backlash you'd expect. But back in Killarney, nobody cared. The Arbutus was loud.
Saoirse Ronan has been nominated four times for Best Actress — Atonement, Brooklyn, Lady Bird, Little Women — and never won. Ruth Negga was nominated too. The Irish Times called Buckley's win the completion of "a job started by three other Irish stars." O'Farrell, the novelist behind it all, is Northern Irish-born and raised in Scotland. Her next book, Land, set in post-Famine Ireland, comes out in June. Best Picture, for the record, went to Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another. But in Killarney, at the Arbutus, with 60 Buckleys watching, the only award that mattered was the one Jessie brought home.
She lives in Norfolk now with Freddie and Isla. She got her start at 17, finishing second on the BBC's I'd Do Anything in 2008, where Andrew Lloyd Webber told her to go to RADA. She went. And then she kept going until there was nowhere left to go but that stage.