Jessie Buckley scores Actor Award nomination for Hamnet

Irish actress Jessie Buckley has been nominated for Best Female Actor in a Leading Role for her performance in the historical drama Hamnet.

It follows her major win at the Critics’ Choice Awards days ago, where she was named best actress.

Her co-star Paul Mescal also received a nomination for Best Male Actor is a Supporting Role, and the whole film was also nominated for Cast Ensemble in a Motion Picture.

The Actor Awards, formerly the Screen Actors Guild Awards, announced their list of nominees at a ceremony broadcast on Netflix’s YouTube channel this evening.

The film, based on O’Farrell’s award-winning novel Hamnet, centres on William Shakespeare, his wife Agnes, and their son Hamnet.

It imagines the emotional, domestic, and artistic repercussions after the world's most famous playwright and his wife lose their only son, 11-year-old Hamnet, to the bubonic plague in 1596.

Four years later, the boy's father transposes his grief into his masterpiece — titled with a common variant of his son's name.

Mescal and Buckley are nominated for their roles as William and Agnes Shakespeare.

Speaking to Hot Press in December, Buckley commented on her work with director Chloé Zhao by saying: “On most sets, everything becomes individual. You are alone in a trailer and then suddenly expected to make these massive leaps of vulnerability. What Chloé did brought us out of our heads and into our bodies. It made the potential bigger.”

Hamnet is set to hit Irish cinemas tomorrow, January 9.