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If Jessie Buckley fails to win the Oscar for best actress next week it will be a sign that cat lovers have got their claws out.
The Irish actor is the runaway favourite for her performance in Hamnet, but in recent days has stumbled into a controversy over a stated antipathy to cats.
She has said she once gave her husband an ultimatum to banish his two cats because they would defecate on pillows, telling a podcast: “I was like, ‘it’s me or the cats.’”
Cat-lovers have responded with indignation and condemnation, sparking a wave of headlines and warnings that “kitty karma” could deny Buckley, 36, her first Academy award.
She attempted to repair the damage on Jimmy Fallon’s chatshow on Thursday, saying it was a “misconception” that she loathed cats. “I am a lover of cats. I woke up this morning [thinking]: does the world think that I really don’t love cats? And it’s really weighed on me all day. I felt sick.”
Buckley said she had auditioned in vain for the 2019 musical Cats. “I gave the worst audition of my life. It was so hot. I was sweating. I was like, licking my paws, like trying to leap. I was just like a hoof of an Irish woman leaping across and licking her paws.”
Earlier this week, the Grammy-winning rapper Doechii also drew an online backlash after declaring cats to be unfriendly and unlikeable.
Buckley’s performance as Agnes Shakespeare in Hamnet has secured multiple awards, including the Critics’ Choice, Golden Globe, Bafta and the Actor awards, and she is favoured to win an Oscar at Los Angeles on 15 March.
However, in the past week the clip from the Happy Sad Confused podcast, recorded last November with her co-star Paul Mescal, resurfaced. Asked if they preferred cats or dogs, both opted for the latter. “Fuck cats, honestly. Fuck them,” said Mescal.
Buckley said that when she was dating her now-husband, one of his two cats was a “pedigree model bitch” who staged a “coup” against her. “I’d come home and there’d just be, like, poo on the pillow.”
Buckley prevailed over the pets, she said: “I won.”
The exchange went viral, with pet-lovers accusing the actor of being mean and controlling, and failing to understand the lovability of cats.
Ireland is rooting for the Kerry actor to win the Oscar but some have warned of “kitty karma”. Ed Power, a cat-loving columnist in the Irish Times, said he had not seen Hamnet. “But if I had, I’d want to build a time machine and go back and give it a skip.”
