"It Was a Way of Exhaling": How Acting Helped Jessie Buckley Find Her Way Back
Jessie Buckley is not someone who shies away from the difficult stuff. The Irish actress — Oscar-nominated, universally acclaimed, one of the most compelling performers working today — has spoken openly about something that had nothing to do with bright lights or standing ovations. As a teenager growing up in County Kerry, she was in the grip of an eating disorder, and for a time, things were very dark indeed.
It was never really about food.
That's the thing most people don't understand about eating disorders until they've lived alongside one. The food is almost beside the point. What Buckley has described is something far more familiar to anyone who's struggled with anxiety: a desperate need to feel in control when everything else feels like it's spinning. The pressure to be perfect. The fractured relationship with her own body. The sense that she was somehow failing at the basic business of being herself.
She has spoken of being in "a very dark place" during those years — not dramatic, not attention-seeking, just quietly, persistently struggling.
Then she found the stage
It might seem odd, on the surface, that someone battling body image issues would find salvation in a career built on being looked at. But that's not quite how it works in practice, and Buckley's experience gets at something rather profound about what performance actually demands of a person.
When you're playing a character, you have to get out of your own head. You're too busy inhabiting someone else's inner world to spend much time tormenting yourself about your own. For Buckley, that temporary relief from the relentless internal critic was genuinely transformative.
There was something else too. Acting requires your body to work — to carry emotion, to take up space, to have presence and energy and strength. It reframes the whole question of what a body is for. Not something to be controlled or diminished, but an instrument. A tool for telling stories.
Finding her people
Buckley has also talked about what the theatre gave her socially. Eating disorders tend to thrive in isolation — the more you withdraw, the louder the disorder gets. What she found in the arts was a community of people who weren't particularly bothered about how she looked. They cared whether she could feel something and make an audience feel it too.
She's described finding her "tribe" — a group of people who valued her for entirely different reasons than the ones her disorder had convinced her were the only ones that mattered.
"It gave me a place to put all those feelings that I didn't know what to do with," she has said. "It was a way of exhaling."
That line says rather a lot.
Why it matters that she talks about it
Buckley didn't have to make any of this public. She's at a point in her career where she could quite comfortably stick to discussing scripts and directors and the craft of the thing. The fact that she doesn't — that she speaks plainly about mental health in an industry not always known for its honesty — makes a genuine difference to people who are quietly going through something similar and wondering if anyone else understands.
Her story isn't a tidy redemption arc with a neat moral at the end. It's messier and more human than that. But it does suggest something worth holding onto: that finding something you love — whether that's theatre, sport, music, writing, or anything else that asks something real of you — can give you just enough scaffolding to start rebuilding. Sometimes that's all you need.