If you’ve never heard of Jessie Buckley, enjoy her rise to stardom before Hollywood ruins the whole thing. In Wild Rose, the Irish actor (Chernobyl) plays Rose-Lynn Harlan, a Scottish ex-con and single mom who dreams of making it in Nashville. 

Critics have been kind to Tom Harper’s comedy-drama, with one comparing Buckley’s voice to “a sugar cube dissolving in a glass of whiskey.” Rose-Lynn downs a few drams herself, but true to country music stereotypes, she prefers to swig straight from the bottle.

Blame it on the devil’s juice

Proving that her vocal effort was no studio trickery, the classically trained Buckley hit England’s Glastonbury festival last month. And just try watching this unadorned performance of “Glasgow” on Stephen Colbert without getting goosebumps. 

In a 2018 interview, Buckley talked about shooting some of Wild Rose and recording its soundtrack in Music City. “Every window you pass there’s just music bursting out of it and you find these little alcoves, like Station Inn,” she said of Nashville. “Or these inns where you can just imagine things, like, went off, especially if there was, like, a bit of whiskey involved. That’s the devil’s juice that makes everybody go a little bit wilder than they thought they were capable of.”

As for her convincing Glaswegian accent, she told the Belfast Telegraph that she spent a month practising it in the Scottish city before filming started. “I was also drinking a lot of whisky in The Ben Nevis,” Buckley admitted, referring to a local pub with no mean selection. “That is really what I did.” As they say in Glasgow, gaun yersel!🥃