Irish singer and actress Jessie Buckley emerged in 2008 as runner-up of the musical theater-themed TV competition I'd Do Anything before making her West End debut in 2009. As a trained actress, she appeared in several BBC television productions in the mid-2010s before starring in her first feature film, 2017's Beast. She proved her versatility as a singer on the blues-rock and country-styled songs of the soundtrack to the film Wild Rose, which received a wide release in 2019.

A native of Killarney, County Kerry, Buckley performed in musicals while attending Ursuline Secondary School, where her mother worked as a vocal coach. During that time, she was also a member of the Tipperary Millennium Orchestra, later studying piano, harp, and clarinet at the Royal Irish Academy of Music. In 2008, Buckley competed on the BBC's I'd Do Anything, a search for an unknown performer to play Nancy in a West End revival of Oliver! She finished in second place on the series in May, then earned the role of Anne Egermann in a revival of Sondheim's A Little Night Music that opened in London in October 2008. The production moved to the West End's Garrick Theatre in April 2009 and ran for three more months.

Buckley returned to the West End after graduating from The Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in 2013, joining a revival of Henry V starring Jude Law. In 2014, she appeared in an episode of TV detective series Endeavour. After portraying Marya Bolkonskaya in the BBC's War and Peace in 2016, she starred in the 2017 film Beast, a British psychological thriller set in the U.S. That year, she also appeared as a regular on the TV drama Taboo and as Honor Martin on The Last Post, both for BBC One. In 2018, Buckley had lead roles in the TV mini-series The Woman in White and the Nashville-set musical film Wild Rose before taking a supporting role in the 2019 film Judy, playing a production assistant to Renee Zellweger's Judy Garland. The following year, she was part of the all-star cast of the family film The Voyage of Doctor Doolittle. ~ Marcy Donelson, Rovi