bitchy | Jessie Buckley ‘hates’ cats & she made her boyfriend give away his two cats

I love many things in this world: cats, chocolate, a good book, Oscar season. Well, something really funny has happened. Jessie Buckley is basically the only “sure thing” in this year’s Oscar acting races – she’s picked up a Golden Globe, SAG/Actor Award, BAFTA and several critics awards. She’s going to win the Oscar and the only other actress who stood a chance against her was Rose Byrne, but Rose has seemed strangely disengaged from her Oscar campaign. Like, I’m not even sure she was really doing much or shaking hands or going to all of those events. So, in retrospect, Jessie was always the frontrunner, far, far ahead of the rest of the field this year. You would think that the other Best-Actress hopefuls and their studios would have done some research to dirty up Buckley’s chances. No one did. Until now, the very tail end of the Oscar season, when it barely matters.

So what’s the big, Oscar-campaign-shattering reveal? Jessie Buckley doesn’t like cats. Not only that, but several years ago, she made her then-boyfriend and now-partner rehome his two cats. Jessie revealed this information herself last November during the Sad Happy Confused Podcast.

In Chloé Zhao’s Oscar-nominated Hamnet, Jessie Buckley plays a bereaved mother whose cathartic grief has reduced cinemagoers around the world to stunned silence. Many Buckley fans were stunned all over again when they learned that Ireland’s 2026 Oscar front-runner… isn’t all that keen on cats.

What moggie madness is this? In a recently resurfaced interview for a podcast in November, she boldly declared: “I don’t like cats. Cats are mean.”

She was cheered all the way by her costar Paul Mescal, who reminded us that, as befits a former Kildare footballer, his talent for own-goals hasn’t deserted him when he agreed, “F**k cats, honestly… f**k ‘em.”

They could have ended it there. People often speak in haste – we’ve all said and done things we regret. But oh no… Buckley had more to share: “They’re too clever. My husband, when I started to date him… he had two cats. This is bad so I’m going to get canceled. But one of the cats was like, a pedigree model bitch. And she staged like a coup against me. I’d come home and there’d just be like, poo on the pillow. And I was like, ‘It’s me or the cats.’ I won.”

[From The Irish Times & Just Jared]

As I said, I love cats. I’m fine with people who don’t like cats, but I think most people who claim to “hate cats” have never really known a cat. But this is something different. While it’s very likely that her partner’s cats were being territorial about their father and their home, it sounds like they had good reason to be. Jessie didn’t even wait to really get to know them before she made her boyfriend give them away. That’s really awful. Those cats were there first! Let’s also say it clearly: the boyfriend/partner sucks too. If a woman gives you an ultimatum about your cats, you choose your cats. Anyway, whoever dug this up is so funny. This really would have affected Jessie’s Oscar campaign a month ago!! But it’s only being picked up this week.

Here’s the November pod interview, I did not listen to more than a few minutes of it.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Backgrid, Cover Images. Photo note by CB: I made the header image with photos of cats from Pexels