Shortly after signing on to star in The Lost Daughter, Olivia Colman recommended that Jessie Buckley play the younger version of her character, Leda. Writer-director Maggie Gyllenhaal has asked Colman about great actors in the right age bracket for the part, and only one immediately sprung to mind. Unlikely as the choice may have sounded—the two actors don’t look much alike and come from different countries with different accents—Colman went with her gut. “I felt like we’re sort of kindred spirits—there’s a naughtiness we both have,” Colman says over Zoom, about her and Buckley, with Gyllenhaal keenly listening in. “We have a very nice time when we’re together.”

One of the most decorated actors of the moment, Colman, as the above answer perhaps tells you, doesn’t overthink her process when considering her art. In conversation, she’s spontaneous, speaking effusively about her collaborators while offering self-deprecation about herself. “Poor Maggie has to do these interviews with me,” Colman deadpans midway into our chat. “She’s just going, ‘Ah, Christ. What’s she going to say?’” (Gyllenhaal, for what it’s worth, responds, “Oh man, I love you.”) Yet her instincts have gotten her this far—she’s on her third Oscar nomination for The Lost Daughter, having won on her first just three years ago—and may have helped the lauded Lost Daughter as well. Under Gyllenhaal’s direction, Colman and Buckley (also Oscar-nominated, her first time) give striking individual performances across two timelines that contribute to a shattering whole. 

“I have no idea what Olivia saw in me,” Buckley says. “We had a very fun night out at a festival the summer before [filming] and sang Adele and Amy Winehouse in an Airstream ’til 7:00 in the morning, so maybe it was my karaoke that made her think I fit the bill.”

In The Lost Daughter, we meet Colman’s Leda, a literature professor, arriving for vacation in Greece. She’s alone, her daughters grown and the rest of her personal life unknown. When she encounters a new mom (Dakota Johnson) on the beach one day, Leda appears haunted, suddenly and palpably; we’re then gradually drawn into her memories of life as a young mother and burgeoning academic, wherein Buckley enters the picture, anguished and yearning. The performances are as unique as the two halves of the character feel. “Jessie and Olivia are completely different people—their energy is different, their everything,” Gyllenhaal says. “And so what were those 20 years in between that we don’t get to see? They must have been a real life, to turn Jessie Buckley into Olivia Colman.”

Colman and Buckley only spoke briefly about how they’d approach the character, settling on a Leeds accent with the “edges knocked off,” reflecting Leda’s global education. They were left to discover the character on their own, and come to their own conclusions. “I was just hoping that Jessie wouldn’t decide to have a limp or something and not tell me,” Colman says, as she often does, with a laugh. “We had complete freedom. It’s lucky that it is quite clear that we are the same person, because I felt so free. I sort of forgot that there was anyone else [telling] Leda’s story.” The electric nature of Colman’s performance comes from that boundlessness; she’d play scenes a bunch of different ways, Gyllenhaal says, finding authenticity in every note. 

“You’re constantly going, why the hell has she done that? Sometimes I was confused,” Colman says of Leda. “You have to let that go and go with it…. I found it mesmerizing that she made decisions I’d never make. I enjoyed playing that.”

Gyllenhaal, again, was never concerned about resemblance between the two women: “This is a movie for grown-ups and no grown-up is going to actually believe that two formidable, fully formed actresses are the same person.” But she does recall the moment in the editing room where the dual timelines clicked into place. Colman’s Leda asks for a drink at the bar and has her first flashback. Gyllenhaal then cuts to the image of Buckley’s Leda peeling an orange with her daughters. “There’s a little shot where Olivia, in profile, moves forward, and Jessie, in profile, moves back. It’s so subtle,” she says. In those touches between them, the film landed deeper for the filmmaker: “Here are these two actresses, Olivia and Jessie, who are so warm, so human. It’s brave to be human—so full of love and humor and, yeah, naughtiness. I don’t think that the movie could have worked without their warmth and openness.”

Gyllenhaal’s screenplay, adapted from the Elena Ferrante novel, is nominated in addition to Buckley and Colman’s performances, and there are numerous places in the film that demonstrate how all three efforts enrich each other. Colman absorbed the script’s younger-Leda scenes to fill in backstory and more strategically play to her present-day sense of ambivalence. But she couldn’t have foreseen Buckley’s take—a fresh interpretation which gives more unusual, spiky dimensions to the character. Colman points to one scene where Buckley’s Leda says, after finishing a call with her daughters, “I hate talking to my kids on the phone.” Buckley’s tone here is bracing, almost caustic. “You go, ‘Oh! She means it in that way—wow,’” Colman says. “The way Jessie does it is so brilliant. It really takes the rug out from under your feet. I just wanted to rewind that and watch. How did she do that?” 

With that added context, Colman’s more interior performance emerges in a new light too. I ask the actor about one scene that takes place in a toy store, in which we see memories of her younger self beginning to overwhelm the older Leda—the trickiness of playing what goes on in the mind. With a warm smile, Colman says she can’t answer that. “I’m very simplistic, not terribly eloquent—I knew that I was having a little flashback to something, so I was playing that,” she says flatly. Evidently, the approach worked. It’s one scene, though, where Gyllenhaal says Colman drove every take to a different place.