Oscars hopeful Jessie Buckley shrugs off cat controversy as biggest night of career looms | Celebrity News | Showbiz & TV

It’s been dubbed the most unpredictable Oscars race in years with winners in the categories for Best Film, Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor/Actress almost impossible to call. In fact, when the 98th Academy Awards kick off tomorrow, the only name that seems a dead cert for a gold statuette is Jessie Buckley for Best Actress in Hamnet.

The Irish star’s enjoyed a clean sweep so far this awards season for her role as William Shakespeare’s grieving wife Agnes in the Chloe Zhao helmed tearjerker. But this wouldn’t be Hollywood without some drama. Because despite being the award favourite for her performance of a lifetime, Buckley is weathering a sudden backlash some Hollywood watchers fear could derail her chances of glory tomorrow [SUNDAY] night.

In the days before Oscar nominations voting closed, a podcast video from November of Buckley, 36, and her Hamnet co-star Paul Mescal, 30, surfaced in which both stars revelled in their disdain for the internet’s favourite animal: cats.

“I don’t like cats, cats are mean,” said Buckley, before revealing she had ousted her future husband’s felines from his life. “One of the cats was like a pedigree model b****, and she staged a coup against me,” she continued. “I’d come home, and there’d just be poo on my pillow. And I was like, ‘It’s me or the cats’. But I won!”

As cat-lovers showed their claws, Buckley was forced into an extraordinary retraction during a nervy appearance on an American chat show.

“I need to clarify something for all cat lovers in the world – I am a lover of cats,” she intoned. “I woke up this morning to the world thinking I really don’t love cats and it really weighed on me all day. I felt sick.”

If that wasn’t bad enough, Buckley has also received Marmite reviews for Maggie Gyllenhaal’s Frankenstein film The Bride!, which is proving to be a horror for all the wrong reasons. Mauled by critics upon release last week, the box-office bomb dubbed a “monstrous mess” had a poor opening weekend, while Buckley herself earned terrible reviews from some critics.

One went so far as to label her performance as “so astonishingly poor and so catastrophically illjudged that it almost needs to be seen to be believed”. Ouch.

There are even whispers that Warner Bros shifted back the original September release of The Bride! to last weekend when only two days of Oscar voting remained explicitly for the purposes of damage limitation – and there is good reason for this.

In 2007, Eddie Murphy seemed a shoo-in for an Oscar after winning both a Golden Globe and the Screen Actors Guild Award for his scene-stealing role in the musical drama Dreamgirls. But he lost out after his big budget comedy flop, Norbit, released two days before the 79th Academy Awards, squandered his chances.

The industry snub, dubbed the “Norbit effect”, proves how a poorly-received film can scupper an Oscar nominee’s chance of winning when the Academy’s voting window remains open.

Hamnet has also had its detractors. The fictionalised drama, based on Maggie O’Farrell’s bestselling novel of the same name, explores Shakespeare and his wife’s anguish over the death of their 11-year-old son, who was said to have inspired the play Hamlet. It’s been branded “grief porn” by some for its emotive and heavily stylised scenes

Yet despite the odd criticism for “heavy-handed” acting, Buckley’s gut-wrenching portrait of child loss has met with widespread acclaim. And fans of the actress will be hoping her her plucky underdog story is the secret weapon that can persuade Academy voters to ignore the recent online controversies.

It was as a curly haired, fresh faced 17-year-old in the 2008 BBC reality talent show I’d Do Anything that Buckley came to most people’s attention. The show, featuring Andrew Lloyd Webber as head judge, centred on the search for a new Nancy in a West End revival of Oliver! But Buckley had pivoted to music long before this. Born in Killarney, South West Ireland, the daughter of a vocal coach, she performed in school productions and studied piano, clarinet and harp at Dublin’s Royal Irish Academy of Music, achieving grade 8 – the highest level – in all three instruments.

Buckley was also a member of the Tipperary Millennium Orchestra and attended summer workshops with the Association of Irish Musical Societies (AIMS) in order to improve her singing and acting. Recognising her talent her teachers encouraged her to apply to drama school in London, which she duly did. However, two establishments rejected her including one on the day before her first audition for I’d Do Anything. She was filmed in tears about it in the early stages.

Still, Buckley had her supporters even then. She particularly impressed Lloyd Webber and came second runner up in a public vote after losing out to Jodie Prenger, 46, who now stars in Coronation Street.

While many reality stars may have optimised their moment with new work opportunities, Buckley retreated from the spotlight and fulfilled her drama school dream. With a recommendation from Mr Lloyd Webber himself, she was accepted into RADA (Royal Academy of Dramatic Art) and graduated with a BA in acting in 2013.

She honed her craft in supporting roles on the BBC dramas War & Peace and Taboo, in 2016 and 2017 respectively. But her breakout came in the 2018 musical Wild Rose, where she received a BAFTA nomination playing an aspiring country singer and single mother of two recently released from prison.

More acclaim followed in 2021’s The Lost Daughter, Maggie Gyllenhaal’s first feature film based on the 2006 novel by Elena Ferrante. Adored by critics, it explored the myths of motherhood with Buckley playing a young version of the main character Leda and was almost certainly her ticket to winning the lead in Hamnet.

Buckley continued to pursue music even while her profile rose on screen. In 2022 she released the collaborative album For All Our Days That Tear the Heart with Bernard Butler, later shortlisted for the 2022 Mercury Prize.

Her increasing fame has made it impossible for her to avoid public scrutiny of late, although she is intensely private. She keeps her former TV producer husband Freddie Sorenson, a mental health worker, out of the spotlight and kept her pregnancy schtum other than showing a baby bump on the red carpet at 2025’s CinemaCon. More recently she revealed to Lauren Laverne on Desert Island Discs that acting was “essential” to her and had helped her with her wavering mental health.

While we can’t know how the recent backlash has affected her psychologically, it’s guaranteed that any remaining anonymity is set to come to an end tomorrow, win or lose. It’s sure to be a nail-biting reveal when the envelope for Best Actress is opened.

Can she do it? Cat lovers aside, many hope so. Her talent alone should determine a win… and maybe the luck of the Irish.