Jessie Buckley has officially made a clean sweep of awards season, earning the best actress trophy at the 2026 Oscars on Sunday for her role in Hamnet.
Buckley beat out fellow nominees Rose Byrne (If I Had Legs I’d Kick You), Kate Hudson (Song Sung Blue), Renate Reinsve (Sentimental Value) and Emma Stone (Bugonia).
“This is really something,” an emotional Buckley said when taking the stage. During her speech, Buckley thanked the “incredible women” nominated in the category, as well as her loved ones.
Of her eight month baby girl, Buckley expressed her love for being a mom and excitement to “discover life” with her.
With Sunday also marking Mother’s Day in the U.K., Buckley dedicated her award to “the beautiful chaos of a mother’s heart”
Backstage, Buckley continued to discuss how special it was to win the award during U.K.’s Mother’s Day. “First Irish woman to win and on Mother’s Day – It feels like some kind of crazy alchemy that all of these things are colliding on a day like today. My daughter got her first tooth this week, I woke up with her lying on my chest, snuggling me. I feel like what a gift to get to explore motherhood through this incredible mother this is and was, and then to become one myself, and then to receive this recognition of the incredible role mothers play in our world on this day is something I will never, ever forget.”
While many of the awards at tonight’s ceremony proved to be more of a toss-up, including both actor categories and best picture, Buckley’s honor seemed one of the few sure bets. Buckley, who was previously nominated for an Oscar in 2022 for best actress in a supporting role in The Lost Daughter, had already won a SAG, BAFTA and Golden Globe for the role in the Chloé Zhao movie about Agnes and William Shakespeare.
Hamnet was nominated in eight total Academy Awards categories, including best picture, best director and best adapted screenplay.
The Hollywood Reporter review of Hamnet out of the Telluride Film Festival reads, “It’s Buckley who really stuns, as she evolves Agnes from the free-spirited girl of the grass to the loving wife and mother to the brittle and grieving woman. She grounds a character who could have seemed too ethereal in raw, naked feeling.”
“I never want to project any idea of what the women I play are meant to be, I just want to go down the river with them and let them have their own voice with it,” Buckley said during THR’s actress roundtable.
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