In ‘Hamnet,’ Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal Spin a Shakespearean Fairy Tale

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 demanding 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 diminutive 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.