Taboo star Jessie Buckley on jazz, panic attacks and dating James Norton

Jessie Buckley has an “I know that” face. But her route to fame has been so haphazard, so higgledy-piggledy that it can be hard to place where exactly you know that face from.

Maybe it was Buckley’s run in the BBC’s 2008 Oliver-themed talent show I’d Do Anything, where a belting voice and a winning, wonky smile saw her take second place to Jodie Prenger (she memorably burst into tears in devastation as the results were announced). Perhaps you caught her singing around the jazz clubs of Britain in the year that followed – a typically improbable career move that began when she drunkenly got up to sing at a late-night haunt. Or you might have seen her play Perdita in Kenneth Branagh’s The Winter’s Tale in 2015, where Buckley proved beyond doubt that she was a classical actress (a discription that makes her laugh like a drain). She might not care about the "classical" label, but playing Perdita would certainly have helped her with last major TV role, as fiery Shakespearean actress Lorna Bow in the grungy 19th century thriller Taboo.

Her breakout role, however, came in the BBC’s War and Peace last year, where Buckley’s devout, delicate Marya Bolkonskaya was a beacon of calm amid the tumult of Tolstoy’s 19th century Russia. And now? She’s doing something completely different once again.

In Peter Moffat’s The Last Post, about a unit of Royal Military Police officers and their families caught up in the fag end of empire in Aden (now Yemen) in 1965, Buckley plays Honor Martin, the new unit Captain’s wife. As the story begins, Honor and her man in uniform are flown in to Aden to begin their posting.

“She’s the child’s eyes way in to this world – she’s never been to a war zone, never been married,” says Buckley. “Everything is very fresh and uncynical. It’s very exciting – in a way she’s wearing the Jackie Kennedy, Audrey Hepburn badge and in her head she’s in a film going in this exotic location where she’ll have an adventure. But the reality of what she’s stepping into shifts throughout the story.”

Honor and her new friend Alison (Jessica Raine) provide what little glamour is on offer in the heat of the desert, as an insurgency against the imperial power starts coming to a head.

“I never play parts like this and that’s one reason why I took it. I usually get the kind of ‘girl who eats worms at school’ parts. I’ve actually got an audition memo from my agent, with a description that reads ‘this is the girl who would eat worms at school’. I was like, ‘Brilliant. I can do that. No worries. Where do I sign?’”

I meet Buckley at a seafront restaurant in Cape Town, during filming of The Last Post. She is the antithesis of Marya in War and Peace: loud, red-haired, with a thick Irish accent and a laugh that prompts disapproving looks from other diners. She is terrific company, a product, one suspects, of a boisterous Irish upbringing in Kerry where she was the eldest of five children.

“My mum’s a harpist and singer and my dad is a barman who writes poetry now and again. They’ve always encouraged us to live life for the experiences it can offer you.”

Buckley, who was taught by her parents to sing and perform, has certainly done that.

“I feel like I’ve gone on a mad, endlessly changing journey both in my life and in my roles.”

That journey began when she moved over to London from County Kerry on her own aged 17 to audition for drama school, where she wanted to study musical theatre. She didn’t get in but the same weekend she received her rejection she auditioned for the unfortunately titled I’d Do Anything. Her second place – in the popular vote, after the judges said she should win – got her an agent and work, in the Sondheim musical A Little Light Music at London’s Menier Chocolate Factory. Then she became a jazz singer.

“I got really drunk one night in a club and sang and the pianist was like, ‘Oh, I’d like to work with you?”’ I was like, ‘Okay’. I didn’t know anything about jazz.”

But she learnt fast, nabbed a weekly slot at Annabel’s and toured the country for the next year. Then in another shift, she got in to RADA and, upon graduating in 2013, began getting work in theatre and on screen. Singing, however, remains her first love.

“I sing all the time on set. I am not even conscious of it. Someone says a line and you end up singing an Elton John song. What can you do?”

Would she go back to jazz hands and big choruses? She pauses.

“If something came along where I had to sing… even if a musical came along at a time I wanted to do it… yeah, why not?”

“Why not?” seems to be Buckley’s defining philosophy. She’s taken roles from across the entertainment spectrum and prospered in every one. The only thing she doesn’t like is the fame that has come with it.

“The hardest thing in this industry is the stuff that surrounds it which clutters what the main focus is. Things like having to look nice or ‘present’ myself at premieres. I actually find that really unnerving. My legs are like boats on stilts and I shake like an absolute mother.”

She met her boyfriend, the actor James Norton, on War and Peace: he played her brother, Prince Andrei.

“Getting cast in that [War and Peace] was terrifying. I had panic attacks for about two months beforehand. But it ended up being the happiest, most fun job. We spent the whole time playing this game Bananagrams in the evening after work. The Bolkonsky family [Buckley, Norton and Jim Broadbent, who played their father Prince Nikolai] would go out for dinner and then play.”

Of Norton, she says: “He’s a brilliant actor. Having friends and family around you that you trust is the most important thing in this industry. I feel like I know my own mind now – but that comes from not knowing my own mind when I first moved over from Ireland. I was on my own, I found it hard, I didn’t know who I was and I had to do a lot of deep digging to find out.”

Next Buckley stars in a feature film, Beast, a psychological thriller set on Jersey in which she plays a girl who has committed a crime but is trying to go straight.

“It’s about how as humans we all have beastly qualities within us. Society tells us to quench them, drive them out, but they’re part of us and at some point you have to let them out.”

And then there’s the BBC’s forthcoming adaptation of Wilkie Collins’ prototype detective novel The Woman in White. Once again, Buckley takes the most interesting role – not Laura Fairlie the naive, fragile one, but Marian, her brilliant half-sister.

“I read this book about Janis Joplin last summer and Marian is like the Janis Joplin of her time – she doesn’t let her sex or societal expectations define who she is. That’s the great thing about what I do: you meet these characters that you play and they teach you something about yourself as well.”

The Last Post is on BBC1 on October 1

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