Watch a Haunting Theatrical Scene From ‘Hamnet’

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“Hamnet,” nominated for eight Academy Awards, looks at the lives of Agnes and William Shakespeare, focusing on their grief after their son dies. This scene comes near the end of the film, when Agnes (Jessie Buckley) goes to the Globe Theater to see the play written by her husband, Will (Paul Mescal), titled “Hamlet.” Will is performing as the ghost, and Agnes comes to realize that he wrote the play as a way to process his heartache.

Narrating this sequence, the film’s director, Chloé Zhao, said the screenplay, which she adapted with the author Maggie O’Farrell from her novel, was all leading up to the moment when Agnes from the audience says to Will: “Look at me.” A sense of understanding and connection comes over Agnes in that moment, as she sees how her husband has channeled his grief into his art.

Mescal’s makeup, playing the ghost in the scene, has an ashen, improvised quality to it.

“Our costume designer, Malgosia Turzanska, and our hair and makeup artist, Nicole Stafford, they traced his character arc where Will was wearing blue when we first met him,” Zhao said. “He wears different shades of blue throughout the film, but as life drains the color out of him, it’s almost as if he was calcified and he becomes colorless and gray, and ashy and crusty.”

The linens of the costumes for the performance were painted by hand, and Zhao said that decision was consistent with the paint on Will’s face, “the idea that the veil between what is real and what isn’t real is just one thin layer of paint away from each other.”

Read the “Hamnet” review.

Mekado Murphy writes about the world of movies and produces the Anatomy of a Scene video series.

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