I Want What They Have, Super-Intense Friendship Edition: Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal

Love is a many-splendored thing, especially when you’re gawking at it from the outside. In this new column, we’ll be examining the celebrity couples—or, occasionally, friend pairs—who give us hope for our own romantic futures as we try to learn what we can from their well-documented bonds.

Run-of-the-mill celebrity friendships are all well and good (in general, I like it when people act normal!), but there’s something really wonderful about a pair of famous pals who aren’t afraid to get a little dramatic with it. Just take Jessie Buckley, who shouted out her Hamnet costar Paul Mescal while accepting her award for best actress at the 2026 Critics Choice Awards last Sunday, saying, “Paul, I bloody love you, man. And I know loads of other women do in this room too, but tough shit. I could drink you like water, working with you every single day. You’re a giant of the heart, and thank you so much for making me a little more human.”

To be clear, I’m not implying that there’s anything remotely romantic going on between Buckley and Mescal. Although he’s constantly trying to beat the dating-costars allegations that date back to his days of sharing the screen with Daisy Edgar-Jones on Normal People, Mescal has been with singer Gracie Abrams since roughly June of 2024, and Buckley recently welcomed her first child with her husband, a man known only as Freddie, who works in mental health and was once a producer on The X Factor. (That’s pretty much everything we know about him, which, in this age of over-sharing, I have to say is quite chic!)

While Buckley and Mescal’s relationship definitely isn’t like that, Buckley’s Critics Choice Awards speech illustrates something I’ve thought for a long time: we could all stand to be a little more passionate and platonically obsessed with our friends. As a recently single 30-something living alone for one of the first times in my life, I’ve never been more appreciative of the besties I can call at any hour to dissect a recent date, puzzle out how to fix my router, or analyze some weird quirk in my dog’s behavior. Sure, maybe it’s a little extra to tell someone who’s just a friend, “I could drink you like water,” but that’s genuinely how I feel every time one of my pals remembers to ask me how a big work meeting went, or brings in my packages when they show up at my apartment for dinner. In these times of uncertainty and chaos, we could all stand to be so extra!