Jessie Buckley can still remember the speech first-time director Maggie Gyllenhaal gave before the cast and crew of The Lost Daughter, saying that a truly great film can only be made “when everybody’s heart is in it.” Buckley says she surrendered to that process, imbuing the character of Leda (played by Olivia Colman in present-day sequences) with every complexity present in Elena Ferrante’s best-selling novel.
“She’s asking people to really step up to the plate and invest all they can and jump off the cliff with her, the way she did completely,” Buckley tells Vanity Fair’s Katey Rich of Gyllenhaal. “As an actress, that’s the best, that’s so much fun. You just feel so compelled to do your best work. And I would’ve jumped off so many cliffs for Maggie, whatever she wanted, I would’ve done.”
In between performances of Cabaret on London’s West End, Buckley talked about taking that plunge, filming her most intimate scenes, and embracing the “beautiful chaos of women” on this week’s Little Gold Men. Elsewhere in the episode, Katey joins David Canfield, Rebecca Ford, and Richard Lawson to analyze the runaway awards success of Drive My Car, unpack the Yellowjackets finale, and preview the Sundance Film Festival offerings.
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Read a partial transcript of the Jessie Buckley interview below.
Vanity Fair: This movie does have a lot of intimacy in it. And a lot of it’s on you and in scenes with Maggie’s husband [Peter Sarsgaard]. Coming from that perspective of working with an actress, having been an actress yourself and getting that level of intimacy with the camera, tell me about the conversations you had to make those scenes feel as real as they do on screen, but presumably comfortable for you and a place that you felt okay going.
Jessie Buckley: I was aware that that part of Leda as a character was incredibly important. Her hunger and her sexuality and her sensuality and her kind of poetry of her body as a woman, was super important to tell the story of this character. So I had a sense of that before we started shooting. That’s also something that I was interested in exploring and embodying.
With regards to the intimate scenes, Maggie created a space, which we owned as the actresses, but also if there was anything uncomfortable where we didn’t feel we were able to do that, and it wasn’t necessarily going to help the story in some way, that was definitely okay too. I never ever felt unsafe. I felt really empowered and enabled. And Hélène Louvart, our [director of photography], is so sensitive and beautiful. I felt really held in that space to really just own it, all of it, it’s nothing to be ashamed of or shy away from. And maybe that was a journey within myself where I was like, “Yeah, I want to do that. Fuck it.”
There’s pretty brief nudity in this, but it’s still a big leap for a lot of people. Is that a conversation you have to have with yourself before you say “Fuck it, let’s go for it”? Is that a big line for you to cross?
Sure. Everybody’s got their own little hang0ups, but I also felt like Leda is a woman that I know in my life. She’s my mom and she’s my sister, she’s me. Her body is all of us. She’s not perfect, and she’s not trying to be perfect. Her beauty comes from her imperfections. In a way, I came to terms with that through her as well. And don’t get me wrong, it also was like, the whole world is going to see my bottom and that’s just there now. So, it’s a gift.
Did you talk to mothers that you know or anyone else beforehand, to research the internal motherhood struggle that doesn’t get seen usually?
I didn’t really talk to anyone specifically. I mean, I felt very close to my mom when I was making this and something that I realized from doing this was nobody else is going to hand you your life. There’s a kind of an unspoken curse that is passed down sometimes between women, and also between a kind of patriarchy or whatever, but really within ourselves is a kind of repression. Being a mother is such a beautiful, incredible thing, but it’s huge, it’s so massive. It’s the biggest thing that can ever happen to you in your life. And there’s lots of colors around that and finding who you are amongst this huge thing is complicated. The thing I learned from Leda is actually cutting the cord of, I call them stone mothers, where people close themselves in because they felt one identity and they forget about all the other parts of themselves. There’s lots of different kinds of moms.
I wonder if working on The Lost Daughter changed anything for you in what you look for as an actor, in a director, in a set, in characters that you play. Was there something that you came from this saying, “Okay, my path has been shifted a little bit in this direction”?
I guess most jobs do in some shape or form. I definitely felt like I grew up as a woman on this set because [of] the women that I was working with and the story that I was working with. I think there was probably a part of me that before this film, in certain scenes, I would have, in a slight way, diffused feelings or parts of myself that I probably felt uncomfortable with, whether that was being girly or whatever. Whereas Maggie created a space where she was like, “Own all of it. Just step in all of it. Don’t try and diffuse it into anything which makes you less.” I definitely feel like that is something that woke me up at this point in my life. I like the beautiful chaos of women and of the world. This was a film which definitely had that.
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