If you have spent any time online in the past few days, you might have seen that Jessie Buckley is taking some heat (and not just in creative pans about The Bride!). See, Buckley is more of a dog person, and while appearing on the Happy Sad Confused podcast in November to promote Hamnet, she and Paul Mescal were asked whether they were dogs or cats. Buckley was quick to say she was a dog and added, “I don’t like cats.” This is apparently because, when she first started dating her husband, one of his two cats “staged a coup” against her, and would leave “poo” on her pillow. “I was like, it’s me or the cats,” Buckley recalled. “I won!”
While this flew under the radar at the time, the clip resurfaced this week — just in time for the end of Oscars voting — and is drawing the ire of every cat lover who saw Hamnet. “I like jessie buckley a lot as an actress, but her gleefully retelling the story of giving her husband the ultimatum of rehome his cats when they got together … not to be dramatic, but that genuinely makes me think less of her. like a LOT,” read a post on X that has been viewed over a million times.
“I’m not even a cat person but this is DIABOLICAL and horrible,” one Reddit commenter shared. “Being proud that you bullied your husband into getting rid of his pets is a very weird flex,” wrote another. Several people in the comments called Buckley’s story a “red flag.”
Fortunately for Buckley, she’s in the middle of The Bride! press, so she was able to address this budding controversy on The Tonight Show Thursday night. “I need to clarify something for all cat lovers in the world; I am a lover of cats,” she declared. “I woke up this morning to the world thinking that I really don’t love cats, and it’s really weighed on me all day. I’ve felt sick.”
In order to help rectify her situation with the online cat community, Buckley added that she actually loves cats so much that she once tried to play one. “I want to just tell cat people that I am … I actually auditioned to be a cat once,” Buckley said, referring to the 2019 adaptation of Cats. Apparently, though, she didn’t love cats enough to get the gig. Her audition went horribly, because she was, in her words, “a hoof of an Irishwoman leaping across and licking her paws.”
That’s sort of an interesting take on Skimbleshanks the Railway Cat, so maybe we can circle back to it when the world is ready for another go at a Cats movie. Buckley will get first dibs, of course.