'Hamnet': Everything To Know

William Shakespeare, in case you missed it, wrote a story or two in his day. Works like Romeo And Juliet, Macbeth, and Hamlet have been adapted countless times at this point, but an upcoming take on the latter is different: It’s a fictional imagining of the real-life events that inspired the play.

Chloé Zhao is tasked with bringing this story to the big screen, but she has help from stars Jessie Buckley, Paul Mescal, Emily Watson, and Joe Alwyn, as well as producers Liza Marshall, Pippa Harris, Nicolas Gonda, Steven Spielberg, and Sam Mendes.

Ahead of the movie’s release, keep reading for everything you need to know before it hits theaters.

Plot

The official description reads, “From Academy Award winning writer/director Chloé Zhao, Hamnet tells the powerful story of love and loss that inspired the creation of Shakespeare’s timeless masterpiece, Hamlet.” The movie is an adaptation of the 2020 historical fiction novel of the same name by Maggie O’Farrell, who co-wrote the movie version with Zhao.

Zhao explained to The Los Angeles Times:

“Maggie’s book laid the foundation, really focusing on Agnes. For the film, I wanted it to be about two people who see and are seen by each other. They’re archetypal characters. I’ve studied Jungian psychology and Hindu Tantra — the energies of masculine and feminine, being and doing, birth and death. If we don’t have a healthy connection to our roots, those forces battle within us. By creating two characters who embody that, the story can work at a collective level and an internal one. The alchemy of creativity lets those forces coexist. Hopefully it becomes something more than a story about marriage or the death of a child.”

Cast

The movie stars Jessie Buckley, Paul Mescal, Emily Watson, and Joe Alwyn.

Zhao told Vanity Fair of Mescal, “Paul’s performance may be more restrained, but you feel that, without him, there’s no her. Jessie and Paul as two actors were extremely giving to each other in that way.”

Buckley added, “It’s no mean feat to step into the shoes of Shakespeare and to bring so much humanity to him, and that’s what Paul, as a person, threads. He has this greatness about him in an old-school way, like Richard Burton had. He’s got a weight that is bigger than his years, and you can really lean on it. Working with him, I was like, ‘Oh, I want to meet you so many times in my life in different ways and work together.’ It felt so alive. Anything was possible.”