Great love can echo across centuries. This seems to be the heart-wrenching truth of Hamnet, the latest film from Academy Award-winning director Chloé Zhao. Adapted from Maggie O’Farrell’s novel of the same name, Hamnet unfolds the little known story of William Shakespeare, his wife, and the love that saw them through times of joy and agony. Beyond that, this critically heralded drama — starring Academy Award nominees Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley — reveals how their story went on to inform one of Shakespeare’s most well-known tragedies, Hamlet.
Mashable’s UK Editor Shannon Connellan sat down with Hamnet stars Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal to delve into what it meant to make a movie with such rich history and profound emotion. For starters, she asked Mescal what it was like to tackle the always intimidating “To be or not to be” soliloquy.
Mescal admitted this scene caused him “great anxiety,” expanding that “to be Shakespeare but also say Shakespeare and also say that speech, that was always one of the big, more technical challenges.” Hamnet gave the acclaimed actor new understanding of Shakespeare’s writing. “Whenever I’ve approached Shakespeare before, it’s like this sacred text. And to me, subjectively playing Shakespeare within [Hamnet],” he explained, “Oh no. These are words that have cost parts of his life to write. They’re not words on a page. They come from him. So there’s a slight freedom in that, where I leant into that so I felt like I could survive the spiders in my mind when I was speaking it all. So I feel very proud of that.”
For her part, Buckley plays Agnes true of O’Farrell’s novel, a woman who is “too wild for any man.” She reveled in the part, telling Mashable, “She’s elemental. Every ounce of her is full. And she has such a kind of uncompromising sense of herself and who she is.”
But of course, Hamnet is about more than Agnes and Will. Asked about performing with the three children who play the Shakespeare brood, Mescal revealed that he, Jacobi Jupe, Olivia Lynes, and Bodhi Rae Breathnach cleverly conspired to prepare a scene in which their characters surprise Agnes with a bit of Macbeth — specifically, the witches’ entrance. “We didn’t let Jessie know that we were gonna do that,” Mescal said, “So that was an actual surprise. I’d rehearsed the kids…so that shot on Jessie — “
“It was real,” Buckley said, picking up the sentence before praising Jupe’s terrific performance as a deeply committed witch. The stars treasured their time on the film and playing family. And you see the cinematic magic of this in Hamnet, which is now playing in select theaters. A wide theatrical release will follow on Dec. 12.
