With each of her movies, Oscar winner Chloé Zhao (Nomadland) begins filming without knowing how the story will end. Her approach to directing is famously fluid, taking cues from actors, nature, dreams, and whatever else to guide her without fear. Her latest, Hamnet, proved no different—though when it came to shooting the final sequence, the stakes turned uniquely high. Her team had built an intricate replica (at about 70% scale) of Shakespeare’s Globe theater circa 1600, the stage for the movie’s imagined original production of Hamlet. Hundreds of background actors were hired as audience members and crammed together. The film’s star, Jessie Buckley, stood among them, having been put through the emotional wringer in the preceding weeks of production.
“For the first two days in the Globe, I was genuinely lost. I felt untethered,” Buckley says. “You’re at the mecca of where Hamlet is born—everything that we’ve gone through was culminating to this point.” Eventually they found their footing. Zhao highlights the faith she always puts in her process, of “something much bigger” presenting itself along the way. Buckley credits a key piece of music by Hamnet’s composer, Max Richter (The Leftovers), with helping her unlock the movie’s final beats.
But in speaking with the director and star, it’s clear they’d already reached a point of deep artistic symbiosis. The tear-jerking ending—and by that I mean: I’ve already seen, heard of, and personally experienced audible weeping as the credits start rolling—may not have been scripted. But it was inevitable.
Maggie O’Farrell’s lauded 2020 novel Hamnet examined the love story of Agnes and William Shakespeare, before and after the death of their eponymous son (played in the movie by Jacobi Jupe). Working both off of research and within the bounds of fiction, the author movingly wrote of how the loss of Hamnet could’ve informed the creation of Hamlet. An all-star producing team including Oscar winners Sam Mendes and Steven Spielberg is now developing a screen adaptation. When the idea first got to Zhao, though, she though about saying no. She hadn’t read the book. She didn’t know much about Shakespeare. She’d never made a period piece: “I felt like, How can I bring what I do into a world that doesn’t exist anymore?”
Zhao asked herself this in the fall of 2022, while driving through the New Mexico desert to the Telluride Film Festival, where she’s become a kind of fixture. She arrived in the Colorado mountains to find Paul Mescal in town with Aftersun, for which he later received an Oscar nomination, and Buckley (nominated earlier that year for The Lost Daughter) roaming about with Sarah Polley’s buzzy Women Talking. Mescal requested a meeting with Zhao, unrelated to Hamnet. “I met with him and right away felt, ‘This person could play Shakespeare,’” Zhao says. She latter chatted up Buckley. “I don’t think we even talked about Hamnet,” Buckley says of their meeting. “I think she was just seeing how much of a witchy spirit I was.”
So Zhao had her actors, theoretically. Then she got to reading. The Hamnet novel opened her mind, as she realized her own way into the Elizabethan tale. “I was so surprised by how immersive and sensorial the book is—and not only that, but the book is written in a way that has almost the same heartbeat as how I would edit,” Zhao says. “Maggie has a very unique way of writing. It feels like images are being edited as I’m reading.”
The novel was celebrated for bringing the English language’s most famous writer down to human scale—and positioning him in an unusual supporting role, with the free-spirited Agnes serving as our emotional anchor. The nonlinear structure dramatized Agnes’s and William’s courtship, the agonizing period leading to young Hamnet’s death, the heavy ensuing grief that created an estrangement between the parents, and, finally, the tragic play that, in O’Farrell’s striking vision, resulted from all this emotional turmoil. Cowriting the script with O’Farrell, Zhao reworked the story into relatively chronological order while also centering William a bit more—if still keeping Agnes as the true focal point.
As Zhao puts it, “It would be about two people finding a way to see each other.”
Hamnet asserts itself, first and foremost, as a Chloé Zhao film. The language, sets, and costuming are not quite historically precise, but Hamnet’s design remains vividly evocative of the period. Zhao calls the movie a grown-up fairy tale. “The good ones are not afraid to go into really dark places,” she says. In the opening scenes, you sense the director energized by the overwhelming nature surrounding Agnes’s home and the exacting visual compositions by DP Łukasz Żal (The Zone of Interest). She basks in the greenery and promise of new love.
This is Zhao’s first film since Marvel’s Eternals, which was mounted on a budget exponentially higher than her previous acclaimed dramas like The Rider and Nomadland (which won the best-picture Oscar). Critics were mixed on the blockbuster tentpole, but Zhao considers Eternals a crucial bridge between her previous movies and this one.
“Eternals prepared me for Hamnet because it’s world-building. Before that, I had only done films that existed in the real world. I also learned what to do and not to do—what’s realistic and what isn’t,” Zhao says. “Eternals had, like, an unlimited amount of money and resources. And here we have one street corner that we can afford, to [stand in for] Stratford…. Eternals didn’t have a lot of limitations, and that is actually quite dangerous. Because we only have that street corner [in Hamnet], suddenly everything has meaning.”
While Zhao was collaborating with major studio executives on Eternals, here she had the likes of Spielberg and Mendes in her corner. “Their feedback was very filmmaker-driven because they’re both incredible filmmakers, so when they gave me notes, they were already infused with what they knew was my style,” she says. “Even when I did things that probably were confusing or didn’t make sense to people, they would say, ‘You know what? We trust her. Let her do her thing.’”
Zhao prepped the film in a few ways. She’d been in Ukraine, observing a colleague who was making a documentary, before traveling with Żal to Wales to scout the woods of Hamnet. They started filming whatever they saw while listening to Richter’s music. Then they stumbled upon a large, dark void in the dirt, which became a major motif for the film. “We want to portray nature in this beautiful, almost romanticized way—but nature is cruel,” Zhao says, before quoting Hamlet: “All that lives must die, passing through nature to eternity.”
Buckley introduced Zhao to dream work, and they jointly plumbed the subconscious before the script was even written. The process revealed Buckley anew to Zhao—specifically, the actor’s connection to the role. “There’s a merging of Jessie and this archetypal feminine force that’s deeply rooted in nature but has been really erased from history—and [it’s] having a resurgence right now,” Zhao says. “Jessie Buckley herself is desperate to evoke that inside of herself, which has inevitably been repressed by being born to today’s world. So the journey was also a rebirth for her.”
When wandering the forest or tending to Agnes’s garden in Hamnet, Buckley seems almost magically at home onscreen. The Irish native felt intimately in sync with a character carrying the reputation of a “witch woman of the woods,” as Buckley puts it. This naturally fed into scenes of extraordinary emotional release—from Hamnet’s birth, to his death, to what comes after—which Buckley performs with a guttural, honest power.
“It was the most fluid, creative, immediate film experience I’ve had,” Buckley says. “Whatever Agnes represented as a woman and in relation to nature and to her children and to life and death…I found that very intense.”
William Shakespeare’s name isn’t spoken for quite a while in Hamnet. Instead, we get to know the man that Agnes falls in love with: a gentle if stoic artist who’s grown up with a hard father, who feels deeply but struggles to express himself. Zhao and Mescal felt aligned from the jump in how to present the Bard, about whom so much remains unknown. “Paul’s performance may be more restrained, but you feel that, without him, there’s no her,” Zhao says. “Jessie and Paul as two actors were extremely giving to each other in that way.”
“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,” Buckley adds. “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.”
After Hamnet’s death, Agnes and William lead parallel lives—Agnes continuing to hold down the home front with their two daughters, and William processing their collective loss through his writing back in London. He is, in a sense, containing their emotional wreckage and figuring out how to make sense of it all. Hamnet absorbs this idea as its own. Zhao found that this version of Hamlet’s creation was not dissimilar from how she should make her own movie. Things got meta.
“We created a working environment where our own lives and what we were dealing with as human beings—not just artists—were allowed to be projected onto the art we were making,” Zhao says. “That is the whole point of this story: how these things we experience in life that are sometimes impossible to deal with can be alchemized and transformed through art and storytelling.”
Which brings us back to the ending, and what the Hamnet team discovered together on those last days. One small gesture inside the Globe transforms the tenor of the play, and in turn, of Hamnet. “We were all waiting for this moment,” Zhao says. “Did Hamlet actually have this moment in the original production? Maybe, maybe not—we don’t know…. But by the time we got there, the veil between past and future, real life and fiction, was very, very thin.”
Hamnet will screen at the Toronto International Film Festival before it’s released in US theaters on November 27. This feature is part of Awards Insider’s exclusive fall film festival coverage, including first looks and exclusive interviews with some of the biggest names set to hit Venice, Telluride, and Toronto.
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