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Jessie Buckley is opening up about the tantric workshop she and Paul Mescal completed to prep for their movie, Hamnet.
Mescal, 29, and Buckley, 36, costar as William Shakespeare and his wife, Agnes, in the new movie, an adaptation of author Maggie O’Farrell’s novel of the same name. While both actors spoke with British Vogue for an article published Tuesday, Jan. 6, Mescal recalled that his chemistry read with his costar was “intuitive and sexy and curious,” while Buckley said that the actors spent time going to “a club called Joyface in the East Village and [dancing] to Abba” in New York City while they were both in town filming other projects.
Buckley also said that their director Chloé Zhao (Nomadland) also had the actors complete a workshop in which they pretended to embody a lingam and yoni, which represent (both figuratively and literally) human reproductive organs in tantric practices. (Tantra is a philosophy that originated in India as far back as the sixth century and is closely linked to yoga practices and sexuality, according to the British Museum.)
“The first three minutes of it were excruciatingly embarrassing,” Buckley told the outlet. “You’re like: ‘We’ve been a penis and a vagina in front of each other, so let’s just go.’ ”
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Zhao, 43, previously told PEOPLE at Hamnet’s November premiere in N.Y.C. that she has been studying tantra and working with a tantric teacher in recent years. “It’s about how to experience life through more of an embodied place instead of one’s mind and I think there are versions of this they would do in acting school just [with] different names, you know,” she said at the time.
“This particular workshop is a polarity workshop and it is about giving [a] safe container for Paul and Jesse to embody their gendered polarity to the extreme, which might be uncomfortable in other settings, but it’s about activating that energy — the masculine and feminine in them to the extreme and see how they play with each other,” she explained.
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“It’s also about asking Paul to contain all the range of chaotic expression that Jesse can can possibly express contained in a safe space,” Zhao added. “So when the container is strong, the water will then calm down and go deep. It was beautiful to see that play out between the two of them at the beginning.”
Buckley won Best Actress at the Critics Choice Awards for her role in Hamnet on Sunday, Jan. 4. At the upcoming Golden Globe Awards on Jan. 11, she is nominated in the Best Performance by a Female Actor in a Motion Picture – Drama category alongside Jennifer Lawrence (Die My Love), Renate Reinsve (Sentimental Value), Julia Roberts (After the Hunt), Tessa Thompson (Hedda) and Eva Victor (Sorry, Baby).
The actress will hit the big screen again this spring in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s new movie, The Bride!, which releases March 6.
