Tribeca Film Festival Exclusive: Jessie Buckley Talks ‘Wild Rose’

Wild Rose, directed by Tom Harper, is about a recent ex-convict, Rose-Lynn (Jessie Buckley), who is dedicated to making it big as a country singer in Nashville. But there’s a few things that complicate her journey: she’s on house arrest, she’s a mother of two school-aged children, and she’s from the Lowlands of Scotland.

Throughout the movie, Rose-Lynn swears to be born in the wrong country after pointing out that no famous country singer has ever come from Glasgow. But even with all the oddities, it’s still a mismanagement of her passion that sort of gets in the way each time.

Rose-Lynn’s mother, Marion (played by Julie Walters), is not as passionate, to say the least, about dream chasing. But she is no stranger to hard work and will do whatever’s necessary to take care of her grandchildren. At times I found that I was rooting for the survival of the family more than Rose-Lynn’s career because the dynamic between them was so strong.

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The turning point in the film is directly connected to the mother’s sense of awareness that she might have killed Rose-Lynn’s hope. When Rose-Lynn is blowing out the candles on her own birthday cake, her son tells her to make a wish. Rose-Lynn is done with wishing by this time and in response to that hopelessness, Marion’s character begins to change. She ends up giving Rose-Lynn the money for her self-enlightening trip to Nashville — from a pile saved up from her 20 years of serving in a bakery.

We sat down with Jessie Buckley at the film’s Tribeca Film Festival premiere to discuss more about preparing for the film. She also treated guests to an amazing performance. 

Jessie Buckley: “Before you do a shoot, you’re on your own preparing for like a month and then, you’re thinking about all the things you will probably mess up. It can never be fully realized until you’re there. And it’s the same with singing. Like, who the hell knows what’s going to come out of my mouth [laughter]? That is always a worry, especially being Irish.”

What was it like working on set with director Tom Harper?

Jessie Buckley: “I was so happy and so alive. And I love Tom. We worked together before and it was in a really trusting environment.”

On singing in front of large crowds…

Jessie Buckley: “I really had like panic attacks doing it and even on the last day of shooting, when I shot everything. I had already done this song before and we were reshooting it and I was about to go on and I got the worst panic attack, and it was a really interesting thing because Tom came out and asked, are you ok? And he was like it’s a really human [thing]. It’s human. Like, it actually would be weird if you didn’t [get nervous].”

In the film, Tom opened up the floor for Jessie to bring that feeling of nervousness to the enactment of Rose-Lynn’s character. During the scene when Rose-Lynn’s boss/friend, Susannah (played by Sophie Okonedo) hosts a party for her benefit — a funding opportunity to invest in Rose-Lynn’s dreams of becoming a country singer —  Rose-Lynn has sort of the same nervous experience that Jessie speaks about. “If I try to stop the thing,” she says, “then it becomes a bigger thing in my head and then I say, it’s not working.”

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On the responses from the audience…

Jessie Buckley: “I used to think that films were something that was a set piece. Something that was made and then stopped and that was it. But every time an audience sees it, it’s a different story and it’s always changing in the moment because of what’s going around in the world, socially or what people are feeling on a certain day.”

For information on the film, click here.

The film and soundtrack on Republic Records are both available June 14^th!