"I LOVE this city. Honest to God,” Jessie Buckley tells me as she sits in the café bar of Glasgow’s Malmaison hotel. “It’s got a massive clutch on my heart.”

Sunday morning coming down. It’s February and the Glasgow Film Festival is in full swing. The night before, Buckley had been in attendance for a screening of her new film Beast. This morning she has already been running in Kelvingrove Park. And now she is on promotion duties before heading back home to London. Not that she is in any hurry. She seems quite at home here.

There is an easy-like-Sunday morning feeling about our conversation. She’s engaged but sprawled back on the sofa. Walking to the Malmaison, I’d noticed a lot of chips and broken glass, I tell her. Late night? She laughs. “I did a little bit. But I still got up and managed to give it one last round.”

She is managing quite a lot at the moment. Because Buckley is everywhere. You may have noticed. Tomorrow night she turns up on BBC One’s new Sunday night period drama The Woman in White, based on Wilkie Collins’ mystery novel, in which she will be seen alongside the likes of Charles Dance and Dougray Scott. And last month she started shooting a film about Judy Garland’s final days, with Renee Zellweger in the title role. Another film, Country Music, should be ready for release later this year too.

“Yeah, it’s busy,” she says. “But I don’t know. I don’t feel very conscious of it. I just want to keep working with great actors and try to be good at what I do. The rest of the stuff is just… stuff.”

She spent four months in Glasgow last year filming Country Music, during which she clearly fell in love with the place. And with country music too, it seems. “I never knew anything about country music. Now I’ve written six country music songs for an album and I’m head over heels in love with it.”

That seems an indication of Buckley’s natural enthusiasm. She is bright-eyed, red-haired, Kerry-accented and full of life. The oldest of five children from Killarney, she is a presence. Off screen and on.

Beast is clear evidence of the latter. Set on Jersey, the film, which has been written and directed by Michael Pearce, is, I think, remarkable. Or maybe it’s that Buckley is remarkable in it. It is both potent character piece and tight-screw thriller. But it’s Buckley you will remember. In the days after my first viewing the after-image of her red hair popping under sullen Jersey skies is seared into my brain.

That’s partly down to the fact that

first-time director Pearce uses Buckley’s red hair as a visual marker. But the truth is, Buckley burns up the screen.

She plays Moll, a damaged young woman who finds herself in the company of a silent young man played with quiet menace by musician Johnny Flynn (who’s also very good). Their relationship spools out against the background of Moll’s repressive family and fears that there is a serial killer on the loose.

Buckley gives the credit for the film’s impact to Pearce. “Michael’s script had a very strong vision and a voice from the first few pages. I just had this guttural reaction to this character. And yeah, she challenged me, scared me, and there was an unspoken energy about her which was something that I hadn’t ever really read before; a dangerous simmering underneath. So, even from 20 pages in, you knew she was going to go on some journey. And it was going to be a lot of fun.”

She stretches that word “lot” out as far as it will go, pulling it like chewing gum around her finger.

“She has an animalistic quality to her that is frightening,” Buckley continues. “And you feel like she’s ready for something to happen. She was an intense character to play, but I never felt drained. I always felt: ‘I can’t wait to come in tomorrow’.”

It’s a film that leaves its characters and viewers on edge. On one level it’s a whodunit, on another it asks what are we all capable of. “We have beastly qualities within us,” Buckley suggests. “If we’re put into certain circumstances and the walls around us come in tighter and tighter we all could maybe do dangerous things.”

What are you trying to tell us, Jessie? “Basically, never come out on a night out with me,” she says, laughing. “No, I’m actually very quiet.”

Beast is a slow-burn movie. It’s a dark fairytale of a thing that is at times, it should be said, uncomfortable viewing . Watching it in the wake of the #metoo campaign, you are painfully aware that once again it is a story that revolves around the murder of women.

Nothing new there, of course. From Hitchcock to Tarantino, filmmakers have always followed the advice of the playwright Victorien Sardou to young playwrights: “Torture the women”.

The question I want to ask, Jessie, I say, is do we need to begin to tell different stories?

Buckley thinks about the question but she’s not sure that she recognises the movie she has made in it. “Ah, I personally never saw her as a victim,” she says of Moll. For Buckley it’s all about Moll’s strength. “And strength isn’t about sass. Strength to me is about exposing vulnerabilities and foibles and facts and people that are honest.

“And with everything that’s going on at the moment, it’s a question that’s come up a lot with this film. Michael didn’t write this with that in mind at the time. People are engaging with it in a different way because of what is going on in society.”

She then widens the argument. “I think for women and men there’s still the stigma of the heroic man, you know. It’s not a case of gender, it’s a case of humanity. We live in a world driven by sensationalism and a sheen that derives from advertising and stuff and emotion is something that is secondary.”

Real life, however, she suggests, is “a bit rusty”, a tad “less sheeny”.

That includes her own, of course, although it has had its sheeny moments. She was last seen on our screens in the BBC dramatisation War and Peace which is where she met James Norton. They became an item for a while, but have now separated.

For most of us, though, our first glimpse of Buckley was on, of all things, a Saturday night singing contest.

In 2008, at the age of 17, having failed to get into drama school, Buckley won a place in the BBC talent show I’d Do Anything which was on the lookout for someone to play Nancy in a new West End version of Oliver! Buckley was runner-up, which won her a role in a Trevor Nunn production of A Little Light Music. Who was that 17-year-old girl, I ask the now 28-year-old Buckley? “Her name was Jessie …” she begins, teasing.

“Honestly, my mum had just had a baby so I was spending time at home. And then when I came to London I was so ready to have a change and an experience. I was so excited to be part of this thing I had always dreamed I would be part of.

“Looking back now, I was totally and utterly fearless. I had no boundaries. I had no relationship to the industry. I had no relationship to London. If my little sister went to London now at 17 I’d be like: ‘Are you mad?’”

Do you ever wonder what would have happened if you’d actually won the contest, Jessie? “No, because I didn’t. I’m really glad I didn’t win it, but I also don’t think it would have stopped me.”

Indeed. After jobs in musical theatre she decided to apply for drama school again. In 2010 she went to Rada, partly, she says, so she could mix with people her own age and go to the pub on a Friday night, partly because she had always wanted to act.

To support herself, she worked in shops and markets. Where did that drive come from? Her parents, she thinks.

“They’re never driven by money. It was always about experience and to apply yourself to everything to do and not be afraid to fall off the edge of the cliff because you can always learn from the fall. Sometimes the climb is a little bit harder, but it will always pay off in the end.”

Her own progress is proof of that. By 2013 she had established herself on the London stage and then came War and Peace, followed by a leading role in the Tom Hardy period thriller Taboo, also on the BBC.

Was her TV talent show background ever held against her in the acting business? “If it was I have never been aware of it. I do remember, actually, someone once told me that I would be nothing more than a cabaret singer so …” She sticks her fingers up in that someone’s general direction.

Why does she want to act anyway? “I love character. I love disappearing into different people’s heads. It’s also become my family. I moved away when I was 17. It’s been a mad journey but I’ve met and made some incredible friends.”

It’s almost time to go. But there’s one question I have to ask her before she does. What I want to know, I tell her, is when she was on the set of Beast with Flynn, did she ever get him to sing the theme tune he wrote for the BBC sitcom Detectorists?

“No, I didn’t,” she laughs. “But one day he did bring his guitar into work and we sat in the trailer while we were waiting and had a bit of a sing. How lovely. Isn’t that so nice? Going to work and being serenaded by Johnny.”

Michael Pearce will attend a screening of Beast at the Cameo in Edinburgh tomorrow at 5.30pm. The film goes on release on Friday. The Woman in White begins on BBC One tomorrow at 9pm