Jessie Buck­ley: ​‘The inti­ma­cy that you cre­ate on set is crucial’

Michael Pearce’s Beast is a dark romance set on the mys­te­ri­ous isle of Jer­sey. It is a film that sub­verts expec­ta­tions – and at the heart of it all is star-on-the-rise Jessie Buck­ley, who deliv­ers a mes­meris­ing turn as Moll, a young woman who finds her­self in a dif­fi­cult sit­u­a­tion when she falls for the black sheep of her community.

LWLies: As some­one who trained as a musi­cian before act­ing, do you find your­self drawn to one over the other?

Buck­ley: I’ve actu­al­ly just fin­ished a film called Coun­try Music, which is about a girl who comes out of prison in Glas­gow and wants to be a coun­try music singer. So I’ve got the best of both worlds! I’m hav­ing a great time.

Do you think you’ll ever go back to musicals?

I don’t know what I’m going to do. I kind of choose things if I feel I’ve got the time and whether it’s going to be fun, and what I’ll learn from it.

What did you learn from mak­ing Beast?

I learned that inti­ma­cy that you cre­ate on set is cru­cial to adding the heart into a film. Your vision is the key, until some­body else comes in and says, ​‘Why don’t you try things over in my cor­ner for a bit?’ That’s the only way sto­ry­telling can evolve. When we were mak­ing Beast we were like a big fam­i­ly, and it encour­aged us to take risks and go beyond what was there in front of us on the page. I felt com­plete­ly sur­prised by that, and learned no mat­ter what, film­mak­ing is about hold­ing onto the rela­tion­ships and dia­logue that you cre­ate on set. Oh god, I’m waf­fling on…

No! It’s refresh­ing to get the inter­pre­ta­tion of an actor who’s been there and lived through it.

What did you take away from it?

I felt in some ways it was famil­iar but at the same time quite new and dif­fer­ent – in the same way Jer­sey seems so close and so dis­tant at the same time to Great Britain.

Yeah, it’s a beau­ti­ful but weird place. I remem­ber going for the first time with John­ny (Fly­nn) and Michael (Pearce) and it’s so ele­men­tal. You’re sur­round­ed by this quite emo­tion­al feel­ing. The land­scape is quite epic but it’s incred­i­bly con­ser­v­a­tive. We had some­one from the gov­ern­ment mea­sur­ing the height of hedges every week. There’s also a dark under­world as well where there’s all these dis­used Ger­man bunkers from World War Two. It’s like nowhere I’d ever been before, and Jer­sey itself is a huge char­ac­ter in the film.

What drew you to the part of Moll?

I was fin­ish­ing film­ing anoth­er project, and I read 20 pages of the script, and I just had a kind of gut­tur­al reac­tion to it. Moll is so com­plex and her sto­ry has such a unique voice and vision. She’s this per­son who is numb and try­ing to atone for a crime that she com­mit­ted when she was 13, know­ing that she has these dark shad­ows with­in her. It isn’t until she falls in love that she starts to engage with her vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty and grow by acknowl­edg­ing it. In the end you don’t know where she’s going to go, but you know she’ll nev­er want to go back to where she was before.

It’s inter­est­ing to see a film like this from a woman’s per­spec­tive, that deals with the dif­fi­cul­ty of being in love, and fight­ing against what you want to believe is true and what is actu­al­ly true.

That’s an inter­est­ing thing as well – the seed of beast­li­ness is inher­ent in all of us, but we can all hope­ful­ly keep a lid on it. Where does Moll’s beast­li­ness come from, and where does it begin and end? Does it begin with her moth­er, does it begin with Pas­cal, or is it inher­ent in her? Is it the place that she’s liv­ing? That was one thread which con­stant­ly kept me curious.

I think for women espe­cial­ly, we’re cowed from a young age into being well behaved, and if you in any way threat­en to be a bit dif­fer­ent you get this sort of vis­cer­al reac­tion. For me, see­ing some­one like Moll was quite freeing.

Yeah, and I think audi­ences’ reac­tions to sto­ries are very much affect­ed by what’s going on around them, and that affects how we watch this sto­ry. Women at the moment are wak­ing up from being numb in a way. So maybe it means that they can watch films like Beast and see the way peo­ple are remould­ing them­selves and being reborn into some­thing big­ger and powerful.

Beast is released 27 April. Read the LWLies Rec­om­mends review.