Updated December 6, 2025 at 9:28 AM EST
“Hamnet,” the new film based on the 2020 acclaimed book by Maggie O’Farrell, is getting rave reviews.
Critics are calling it “shattering” and “a masterpiece.” O’Farrell wrote the book after discovering that William Shakespeare lost his only son, Hamnet, who was just 11, to the 1596 bubonic plague. Her book explores the possibility that the death of Hamnet inspired “Hamlet,” which had its first recorded performance just a few years later.
O’Farrell wondered why Hamnet’s death is just a footnote to history, when in fact he may have been the reason for “Hamlet,” the immortal play. And if Shakespeare’s wife, Anne Hathaway, also called Agnes, was frozen in grief over Hamnet’s death while Shakespeare was frozen in suppressed grief. Only his play, “Hamlet,” could unlock them both.
O’Farrell co-wrote the screenplay with director Chloe Zhao.
In the movie, actor Paul Mescal plays Shakespeare, an impoverished Latin tutor. Jessie Buckley plays his wife, Agnes, a falconer, forger, the daughter of a mystic who people thought was a witch. And when the cast and crew finished their work, alchemy, magic occurred.
Chloe Zhao, you’ve said “Hamnet,” the book. came into your life like a whisper and grew into a hurricane. What did you mean?
Chloe Zhao: “My teachers often would say something like, ‘Be mindful when you pull a tarot card. Every time you do something like that, you create a bridge to something else.’ I’ve remembered to have a lot of reverence with that. And I believe every world Maggie [Farrell] wrote is building a bridge to something bigger.”
Jessie Buckley, what was your reaction reading the book and in it meeting the woman you would play, Shakespeare’s wife, Agnes?
Jessie Buckley: “Oh, it was a pretty explosive experience reading this book because there was so much of it that just ripped through me, you know? And Maggie writes like a poet. We all have a kind of relationship with Shakespeare, even just as a word that feels giant. But to distill that giant part of him down to his absolute humanity, which is where he wrote all his plays from, and to go on a kind of imaginative journey to think about who were the people and the love and the deep relationships around him that might have inspired some of his greatest humanist plays, like ‘Hamlet.’ You know, who might these people be? Agnes was, I don’t know, I think I was meant to meet the story at this moment of my life.”
Maggie O’Farrell has said she was inspired to write the novel in part after reading Germaine Greer’s “Shakespeare’s Wife.” Greer takes apart claims that were made that Anne Hathaway was an uninteresting country woman. Jessie, is that a part of this, too, about elevating her?
Buckley: “I mean, isn’t that the kind of thing we’re constantly trying to unravel stories that aren’t ours and find the truth of what I recognize and in the women in my life and in the women that I play, we’re not country, but we’re epic, deeply interesting, complex.
“There’s no way that Shakespeare could write Lady Macbeth without knowing a woman who is as deeply complex as somebody like Agnes. The tenderness, the ferocious tenderness of what it is to be a woman.
“And for a woman to be connected to her body and mind and something ancient and life and death, in the way that Agnes is, it’s scary to people. We’re putting something out there that is the truest expression from us as women beside our beautiful men who we champion as well.”
Agnes does champion Shakespeare and his writing talent. They have three children; she encourages him to go from Stratford to London to write. And spoiler alert, while he’s gone, young Hamnet dies. Chloe, you’ve said you’ve been afraid of death your whole life. That scene must have been hard.
Zhao: “Oh, that scene. Oh, yeah. I think you’re afraid of something that you don’t know. And yet in the lineage Agnes comes from, the forest, death is as important of a human condition as birth.
“I think I create in order to really help myself to understand that. When we film a scene like that, it gives me the evidence because of the fact that death and grief and loss actually connect us as human beings just as much as joy. The interdependence on set that day, from actors to drivers, you know, to cinematographers. Everyone held each other.
“We all have inner Agnes and inner Will. He is constantly wondering, ‘To be or not to be.’ The trick is, can you sit in your pain? And then for him, Will comes through something that’s bigger than him. One of the greatest, you know, soliloquies that’s ever written.”
When he finally stages Hamlet, we see Agnes watching her husband’s production at The Globe. Jessie, no words from you, but what are we seeing emanate from you?
Buckley: “I think we see searching and seeking for the things that I’ve lost. Looking for her husband to make him accountable for stealing her grief for something she doesn’t know what it is. And then there’s deep, deep, deep surrender. The magic that her husband does weave, creating a story that is big enough to hold that pain.
“And also to be held by the strangers around her who have also a private grief. I’m sure if you’re to love at all, if you’re to live it all, you’re always going to be at the risk of losing something. But she needs her husband’s landscape to help her see the thing that she lost, for just a glimmer of a moment.”
This interview was edited for clarity.
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This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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