Nestled in the heart of Claridge’s hotel’s Art Deco splendour, a handful of filmmakers’ fates are about to be changed by Jessie Buckley, Gwendoline Christie, Edward Enninful, producer Marie-Louise Khondji and BFI CEO Ben Roberts. The force that has pulled this eclectic crew together on an otherwise ordinary Tuesday afternoon? Chanel. “It’s a risk to become a filmmaker now,” says Buckley, who sat on this year’s jury for the BFI and Chanel Filmmaker Awards, and landed on Rich Felgate, Olive Nwosu, Imran Perretta and Rachel Taparjan as the creatively audacious recipients of the £20,000 bursary – presented with a mandate to dream big.
Chanel’s relationship with film goes back to Gabrielle Chanel’s first foray to Hollywood in 1930, when she was invited by producer Samuel Goldwyn to dress actresses, like Jeanne Moreau and Romy Schneider, but for Buckley, fashion and film will always be natural bedfellows: “It’s all a form of expression, isn’t it? I don’t just act. I need music, art, poetry – all the things to help me wake up to something that I didn’t recognise before.” She praises current creative director Matthieu Blazy for making clothes that live beyond the runway: “It feels so alive; you can tell everybody’s having fun.”
The jury day for the Filmmaker Awards was similarly vibrant, and an outlet in which Buckley could explore a different part of herself. “I really go way off grid [when not in promo mode], I shouldn’t be allowed anywhere outside my house,” she says of her life with her mental health worker husband and their one-year-old daughter in Norfolk. “When I come to London, I feel like a farmer arriving in a big city.” Wearing a black ecru and white silk knit top, a black viscose skirt and heels from the autumn/winter 2026 collection, dotted with a subtle frosting of Coco Crush jewellery, there is nothing even remotely rural-chic about Buckley’s appearance, I tell her, eliciting that trademark grin.
“Chanel could have given me anything and it would have been a hell of a lot better than what I walked in with,” says a wonderfully self-effacing Buckley of her look for the BFI and Chanel Filmmaker Awards.
James D KellyBlazy’s Chanel was made for women like Buckley, who can see what the designer is doing behind all that new-era bouclé. “I think we don’t afford women the joy and that fizzy frivolity that Chanel expresses in the clothes,” she shares. “Often we’re so conditioned to talk about bodies or beauty or whatever without expressing the life force of what women are. Matthieu just puts that into a bottle and hands it to all these incredible women on the runway.”
Crediting her Aunt Mary’s fancy-dress box and an heirloom coat of her mother’s for her early love of fashion, it is Chanel who helps harness Buckley’s innate creativity into looks, like today’s polished two-piece and that Oscar-winner gown, which make the 36-year-old Killarney native feel like the best version of herself. “[At the Academy Awards], I felt joyful and colourful and intelligent and strong and that no matter what room I walked into that I could be myself,” she recalls of the Grace Kelly-inspired, pink-and-red gown. “It’s always a question of, ‘Can I walk in these heels and can I get away with not wearing Spanx?’ But it’s a celebration of being a woman and the body that you get to live in and not having to change it.”
The 2026 jury.
Jury process aside, Buckley’s cultural diet is also about balance. A reassuringly avid Celebrity Traitors fan (“I was really sad Richard E Grant shot himself in the foot”) and devoted Fontaines DC listener (“I’m so proud”), she’s been rewatching old films (Seven Samurai is a particular favourite) in addition to immersing herself in the new work from Felgate, Nwosu, Perretta and Taparjan that sparked debate with her peers. Watching the star on stage, fizzing with that Chanel-ified joy before an audience including Adwoa Aboah, Sebastian Croft and Sophie Okonedo, one imagines every creative would like to have Jessie Buckley in their corner.