THE RUNDOWN
- Jessie Buckley won the Best Actress Oscar for her performance in Hamnet this evening.
- She was the frontrunner going into the ceremony, following her wins in the category at the Golden Globes, Critics Choice Awards, BAFTAs, and Actor Awards.
- In her speech, she discussed the power of motherhood and thanked her husband, daughter, and several cast and crew members.
Hamnet’s Jessie Buckley is officially a Best Actress Oscar winner. The milestone victory comes after she won in similar categories at the Golden Globes, Critics Choice Awards, BAFTAs, and Actor Awards. During her speech, Buckley touched on what the project taught her about motherhood, thanked her 8-month-old daughter, and told her husband, Freddie, that she’d have “20,000 more babies” with him if she could.
Read every word of her speech below:
Thank you so much. This is…this is really something. Thank you to the incredible women that I stand beside; I am inspired by your art and your heart, and I want to work with every single one of you. To the producers who created this ship for us to stand in, and my shipmates for life—Hilda, Jessica, Lindsey, Zack—none of this is possible without you. My family, my Irish family, they’re all here. Mom, Dad, thank you for teaching us to dream and to never be defined by expectation and to carve from your own passion. You, Fred, I love you man. I love you; you’re the most incredible dad. You’re my best friend, and I want to have 20,000 more babies with you, I do. I do! And Isla, my little girl who is eight months, who has absolutely no idea what’s going on and is probably dreaming of milk, but this is kind of a big deal, and I love you and I love being your mom, and I can’t want to discover life beside you. Chloé [Zhao] and Maggie [O’Farrell, the film’s screenwriters], to get to know this incandescent woman and journey to understand the capacity of a mother’s love is the greatest collision of my life. It’s Mother’s Day in the U.K. today, so I would like to dedicate this to the beautiful chaos of a mother’s heart. We all come from a lineage of women who continue to create against all odds. Thank you for recognizing me in this role. This is the greatest honor. I can’t even believe it.
Watch her speech below:
At the Actor Awards earlier this month, Buckley took home the award for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Leading Role and thanked the community of performers in the room who had shaped her. “I want to take a minute to see all these incredible, inspiring faces and souls in front of me,” she began her speech. “I have been categorically changed by so many people in this room and beyond. To get to work with my heart in my hand and stand beside my brilliant, daring friends who show me their heart, I mean, what a way to spend a life! Thank you.”
She then singled out her Hamnet co-star Emily Watson, crediting Watson’s work in 1996’s Breaking the Waves as what sparked her own acting ambitions.
“Breaking the Waves made me whisper to myself that’s what I want to do, and to share those scenes with you in Hamnet, I will cherish that for the rest of my life,” she said. “Your wild imagination, your brave, untethered womanhood, your ferocious gentleness is a guiding light to me. And the best advice that you always give to me is to always go back to the well of just being human. Ground zero, babe. You’re the realest of the real. I love and cherish being part of this community. I hope that I can continue to offer something meaningful back. Thank you very much. This is such a privilege.”
Buckley was one of ELLE’s 2025 Women in Hollywood honorees and spoke in her interview about the other actresses who have influenced her. “Frances McDormand, Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck, and Laura Dern,” she started. “What they play is so full. They’re not playing something to appeal. They’re playing a life that is complex and rich and uncomfortable and challenging and provocative. What I’ve learned from them is, get to know yourself and just keep being ruthless in bringing the life force of what it is to be a woman to the surface.”
Additional reporting by Starr Bowenbank.
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