![](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/bc466b07e98df1cbb4de76e91fcb09fbef-jessie-buckley.rhorizontal.w700.jpg\")
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When you hear Jessie Buckley\u2019s name, what image springs to mind? Given the Oscar buzz around her performance in Chlo\u00e9 Zhao\u2019s Hamnet, it\u2019s probably the Irish actress dressed in red as William Shakespeare\u2019s wife, Agnes, roaring like a wounded animal over the death of her son.<\/p>\n
But to a certain millennial-and-over subset of the British public, there\u2019s a specific version of Buckley that\u2019s hard to forget: one with smoky eye shadow, her hair in tight curls, singing her heart out in a shiny dress that could have come in a \u201cVictorian woman\u201d costume bag from Party City \u2014 the same one she wore on live TV every weekend for three months in the spring of 2008. There, Buckley belted out a catalogue of show tunes, jazz standards, and pop songs in front of composer Andrew Lloyd Webber and a panel of judges in a desperate bid to snag the part of Nancy in the big-budget West End revival of Oliver!. Her voice was undeniable, even if the judges dinged her for how stilted her movement was. (She often sang with her arms limp at her sides.) Her awkwardness made sense, though. After all, Buckley was just 18.<\/p>\n
The BBC series I\u2019d Do Anything arrived in the middle of the reality-TV boom of the 2000s, when everything from ice dancing to finding a \u201cBritish best friend<\/a>\u201d for Paris Hilton could be turned into a competition format. The show was the third installment in Webber\u2019s reality-TV empire, each airing in a prime-time Saturday-night slot on the BBC with Graham Norton hosting. The aim? Finding fresh musical-theater talent to lead new productions of The Sound of Music, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Oliver!, and The Wizard of Oz. In allowing the viewers to have their say in the casting process by voting along, the public became invested in the U.K. theater scene like never before.<\/p>\n It cannot be understated just how strange the Webber shows were. Collectively referred to by their respective character names (as the \u201cNancys,\u201d \u201cMarias,\u201d etc.), the contestants lived in a house together and were sent out each week to take part in themed \u201cmissions.\u201d In the case of I\u2019d Do Anything, Buckley & Co. worked at an East End market and, for some reason, were made to practice kissing scenes in front of their fathers<\/a>. (Buckley, at least, saw the humor in it, jokingly prodding her father and telling him, \u201cYou\u2019re not meant to see that, Dad!\u201d) And then there was head judge Webber, who sat on a throne and was referred to as \u201cthe lord\u201d throughout.<\/p>\n Still more ridiculous was the climax of each results show, when the eliminated Dorothys placed their ruby slippers in Webber\u2019s hands and the departing Josephs were stripped of their colorful coats by fellow contestants before being made to sing \u201cClose Any Door.\u201d There was always someone, usually multiple people, crying, and who could blame them? Dreams were being destroyed live on TV. Musical theater being more of a niche than pop, the Webber shows didn\u2019t produce stars on the scale of American Idol\u2019s Kelly Clarkson or The X Factor\u2019s Leona Lewis. But while they aired, the contestants were proper celebrities. When the Sex and the City movie premiere came to London, the Nancys walked the red carpet. Buckley wore a wide-sleeve floral dress and chunky bow belt. It was all very 2008.<\/p>\n These shows not only gave viewers a peek behind the curtain and onto the stage but rewrote the rules on who could stand up there and sing in the first place. Trained actors with agents could try out, but they\u2019d have to line up to audition alongside amateur performers with stage experience limited to school and community productions. Buckley, who had been rejected from London\u2019s Guildhall School of Music & Drama just days before the I\u2019d Do Anything open auditions, was firmly in the latter camp. Her small-town beginnings in southwestern Ireland were a constant focus throughout the competition. \u201cNothing as big as this has ever happened in her town,\u201d her mother, Marina, told the cameras.<\/p>\n They had plenty to be proud of. From the outset, Buckley established herself as one to watch. Webber was a particular fan and would wax lyrical about her voice and its ability to \u201cpin [him] to the back wall.\u201d The other judges, however, were less sure. There was a real obsession with Buckley being a bit awkward and unsexy and too much of a \u201ctomboy,\u201d all of which amounted to a narrative, as one judge scoffed, that she was \u201cso <\/strong>unfeminine.\u201d Those comments felt at odds with the rough-and-ready \u201cstreet kid Nancy\u201d Webber professed to be looking for (as opposed to a pious Maria or na\u00efve Dorothy). They\u2019ve aged especially poorly considering the roles Buckley is now known for \u2014 in Women Talking, Wild Rose, and, yes, Hamnet \u2014 and the ungendered earthiness she brings to each.<\/p>\n At the time, Buckley was emotional and, understandably, confused. In a recent British Vogue interview<\/a>, she spoke about the I\u2019d Do Anything judges\u2019 \u201cmessed up\u201d fixation on her femininity or lack thereof. \u201cI was growing into my body,\u201d she told the magazine. \u201cI was in a moment of discovery. As women, it\u2019s such unfair objectification.\u201d<\/p>\n Over the season\u2019s duration, Buckley earned an unfortunate reputation as the \u201cinconsistent\u201d one. She would leave Webber visibly vibrating in his chair with her rendition of \u201cThe Man That Got Away\u201d one week, then was declared too \u201cemotionally fragile\u201d to be Nancy the next. Yet the voting public clearly saw the same star quality in Buckley that \u201cthe lord\u201d did. She was never in the bottom two and eventually made it to the final alongside 28-year-old northern lass Jodie Prenger.<\/p>\n A former winner on the U.K. version of the weight-loss competition The Biggest Loser, Prenger had charisma by the bucketload and experience that Buckley lacked. The panel was split on who they wanted to be Nancy; Webber and producer Cameron Mackintosh, however, backed Buckley. So when Norton declared Prenger the winner, you couldn\u2019t blame her for looking genuinely flabbergasted. Buckley put on a brave face, smiling before running to her family, while Webber declared Prenger \u201cthe people\u2019s Nancy\u201d (ouch).<\/p>\n It\u2019s to Buckley\u2019s credit that she knew what she didn\u2019t want to do after I\u2019d Do Anything. When Mackintosh asked her to be Prenger\u2019s understudy in Oliver!, she turned it down and instead appeared in a revival of Stephen Sondheim\u2019s A Little Night Music at an off\u2013West End theater. A stint as a jazz singer followed, leading to Buckley picking up where she left off before her first TV audition and going back to drama school. She\u2019d been going down one path since 2008 and now \u201cwas wanting to get off the track,\u201d she told The Guardian<\/a> in 2019.<\/p>\n Even non\u2013I\u2019d Do Anything viewers are now familiar with the rest of her story: the BBC dramas, the BAFTA nominations for Beast and Wild Rose, the Charlie Kaufman and Alex Garland films, the Olivier-winning turn as Sally Bowles opposite Eddie Redmayne\u2019s Emcee. An Oscar for Hamnet would be a testament not just to the raw talent you can see on I\u2019d Do Anything but to the willingness of the people around Buckley and the actress herself to invest in and nurture that gift. She\u2019d still have something special without it, but who can deny the magic of a reality-TV runner-up to Oscar front-runner story?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When you hear Jessie Buckley\u2019s name, what image springs to mind? Given the Oscar buzz around her performance…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":802170,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[3940],"tags":[80187,153074,4080,77,162188,3943,232430,11727,382,16,15,10357,10356],"class_list":["post-802169","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-andrew-lloyd-webber","tag-awards-season","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment","tag-jessie-buckley","tag-movies","tag-remember-that-time","tag-television","tag-tv","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-vulture-homepage-lede","tag-vulture-section-lede"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/116167720889839348","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/802169","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=802169"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/802169\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/802170"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=802169"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=802169"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=802169"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}