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.
With such nuanced, sensitive and insightful films as 2017’s The Rider and 2020’s Oscar®-winning drama Nomadland, writer-director Chloé Zhao has earned a reputation as one of the most singularly gifted filmmakers of her generation. Now, as writer-producer-director-editor, she brings her visionary approach to Hamnet. The film centers on the marriage between Agnes and William Shakespeare and explores the tumultuous events involving the couple’s son Hamnet, which would ultimately inspire the creation of the Bard’s timeless masterpiece, Hamlet.
The film springs from the pages of Maggie O’Farrell’s acclaimed eighth novel, Hamnet, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Women’s Prize for Fiction and was cited as one of 2020’s five best works of fiction by the New York Times Book Review. For O’Farrell, the story was one she’d hoped to tell for nearly three decades, after having discovered little-discussed details of Shakespeare’s family life, specifically the death of his only son Hamnet, who succumbed to the plague at just 11 years old.
“I always felt it was very unjust to this boy that nobody ever made the connection between this child called Hamnet and the play that was written four or five years later called Hamlet,” O’Farrell says. “This child had become so sidelined, a footnote in his very famous father’s story. So, the whole impetus to me writing the book was to put him on stage and to say that this child was important. He was loved. Without him, we wouldn’t have Hamlet. We owe this child so much, yet he was not part of the conversation at all.”
Although he receives title billing in O’Farrell’s novel, the child is not the central protagonist in her story. That role instead falls to Agnes(O’Farrell calls her character by the name she was given at birth, pronounced Ann-yis, rather than the more familiar Anne). The experienced falconer, forager and healer is as untamed as the lush and verdant landscape that surrounds her home. Her strong connection to the natural world borders on the mystical, and her wild, unconventional demeanor is instantly attractive to Will, who also harbors rebellious feelings toward his domineering father and the strictures of late 16th century society.
Together, they make a formidable duo whose passions are in sync for much of the early years of their marriage. But their bond begins to fray as Will, encouraged by Agnes, pursues his dreams of creative expression. His sojourns from their Stratford-Upon-Avon home to London to work in theater are his lifeblood, something his wife understands all too well, but his absence is felt keenly by his family, particularly little Hamnet. Agnes uses her skills to make a lovely home for the boy and his two sisters, Susanna and Judith, though some forces prove too strong for even the most fiercely protective mother to keep at bay.
After Hamnet’s sudden illness and demise, the family is sent reeling from the loss, yet Agnes must remain steadfast in her commitment to her daughters and her husband. Still, the couple struggles to move beyond tragedy and find a path toward forgiveness, acceptance and fulfillment. Agnes immerses herself in nature, while Will pours his grief into a play that would live on throughout the centuries, Hamlet (which, in the 16th century, was a common variant of his son’s name)—about a teenage prince who outlives his murdered father. Each finds a kind of catharsis in the act of creativity and imagination, giving meaning to the suffering they’ve experienced.
REVIEW
A Statement From Chloé Zhao
Hamnet is about love and death and how these two foundational human experiences can alchemize and transform each other through art and storytelling.
It’s a story of metamorphosis.
I don’t often have words to describe why I choose a project. I’m often guided by instinct, a tight pull on my heart center. Stories appear in my life as if they have chosen me and I have no choice but to surrender to them. Hamnet came into my life like a whisper that grew into a hurricane. By the end of the journey, I was tenderized. I had truly experienced what it feels like to live with an open heart in the eye of a storm – the beauty, the pain, the thrill at the edge of annihilation and the silence.
From the black hole in the spring ground of the old forest to the dark door on the stage of the rain-soaked Globe Theatre, I descended with a village of brave souls and together we held onto each other and let the underground currents of our unconscious take us. In the chaos we asked Agnes and William to guide us. We asked all the women past and present who suffered great pain and loss and the men who suppressed their feelings and ran away from themselves to guide us. We asked the forest, the river, the earth to guide us, and we asked our own wild hearts that desperately yearn for freedom and peace to guide us. In the end, as we danced on and off the stage of the Globe, the veils between reality and fiction, past and present, the seen and the unseen, love and death dissolved. There was no separation. We were one in those precious moments. I felt in my body, in my bones, that love doesn’t die, it transforms.
I have been afraid of death all my life and as a result, I have been afraid of love as well. I didn’t know how to keep my heart open staring at the impermanence of life. I’ve made four films about characters experiencing great loss and finding themselves through acceptance. HAMNET is the accumulation of that journey. With the sacred container of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, I went down deeper into the underworld to retrieve what was lost, that made me so afraid to experience both love and death. Maggie had opened a portal with her book, a bridge for us to connect with Will in ways we haven’t before.
“All things in life must die, passing through nature to eternity.”
“To be or not to be, that is the question.”
“The rest is silence.”
Will had written a story about love and death and I feel honored and fortunate to be able to interpret his messages for today’s audience. We knew, felt, that he was with us.
In our story, Agnes and William fell in love and had a beautiful family until they both found themselves at a threshold after the death of their son. They couldn’t go back to the past and they couldn’t move on. They are frozen in a liminal place, pulled towards opposing directions but cannot move an inch.
It is with such tension ALCHEMY occurred. In physics, when forces pull or push in opposing directions, they create tension. When that tension is too strong, it leads to movement and a new state of equilibrium: in the exact moment when Will finds himself between land and sea, life and death – one of the greatest pieces of literature was born.
Our world is at a threshold. We all feel the immense tension and pressure. We can sense a new state of equilibrium approaching. Many of us are frozen in a liminal place, afraid to move. I see the fears that plague me in others’ eyes. The fear of what will come. The fear that we don’t have control over our own lives. The fear that we are no longer safe in this world. The fear that we will never know unconditional love. And ultimately, the fear of death, a death without meaning.
The deepest reason for making this film is to bring disillusionment to that fear by showing the power of metamorphosis we have within us as human beings and our ability to alchemize our experiences no matter how painful they are.
We are all born into this world feeling the tension of the void. We must make a choice to keep our hearts open and walk through the flames.
Love doesn’t die, it transforms. It is the greatest metamorphosis in this universe, and I hope our film serves as a humble reminder of that.
The journey from page to screen
Hamnet’s journey to the screen began when Hera Pictures founder and producer Liza Marshall received an early copy in November 2019, several months prior to the book’s publication in March of 2020. “Because I’d read all Maggie O’Farrell’s previous novels and I’m such a super fan, I sat down and read the whole book in one night and completely fell in love with it,” Marshall recalls. “It was such an extraordinary, moving piece of writing.”
Securing the rights to adapt the novel, Marshall eventually came to partner with both Neal Street Productions’ Pippa Harris (1917) and Book of Shadows’ Nicolas Gonda (Knight of Cups) on the project. Harris, too, had read O’Farrell’s novel and found it to be meticulously researched and incredibly moving. Harris’ producing partner, Oscar®-winning filmmaker Sam Mendes, signed on to produce. Joining them was Steven Spielberg’s shingle Amblin Entertainment, with whom Neal Street had made the lauded World War I drama 1917. The film industry legend chose to sign on as a producer on the film as well.
For the producers, recruiting the right filmmaker to take the reins of the project was critical; they were seeking someone who would respond to the elliptical nature of O’Farrell’s writing and the unconventional nature of her heroine. All agreed that Chinese-born, British-educated writer-director Chloé Zhao, given her impeccable artistic résumé, was an ideal candidate. “Liza, Pippa, Steven and I all felt that Chloé was the perfect director for this material. Not only does she have an entirely unique approach to film making, she is also one of the most empathetic souls I’ve ever met. Her close collaboration with Jessie, Paul and the rest of the cast allowed them to flourish as actors in extraordinary ways, and to make a movie that combines rawness and delicacy in ways I’ve never seen,” notes Mendes.
“The beautiful and memorable storytelling in Maggie O’Farrell’s best-selling novel deserved to be brought to the screen by a filmmaker who would protect the material’s integrity and demonstrate an intuitive understanding of the emotional and complex journey that the characters—and the audience—take over the course of the story. There was only one director I knew who would bring Hamnet to the screen with such compassionate care, and that is Chloé Zhao,” says Spielberg. “In adapting the novel with Maggie, Chloé’s inherent humanity, unerring sense of narrative, and gift for getting remarkable performances infuse every frame of Hamnet”.
The first female of color and first Asian woman to win the best director prize at the Academy Awards® for Nomadland, which also nabbed the best picture Oscar®, Zhaohad earned acclaim as someone whose films, which often featured non-professional actors, were visually arresting tales interrogating the condition of people on society’s margins with great sensitivity and insight.
“Chloé has a rare gift for distilling stories to their purest essence, uncovering the soul within the structure,” says producer Gonda. “She doesn’t just look at the surface of a story — she wants to understand what pulses underneath it. With a figure as iconic and unknowable as Shakespeare, it takes someone with Chloé’s particular sensitivity and curiosity to uncover not just the facts, but the emotional truths hiding between them.”
O’Farrell was excited by the choice. “Chloé, with a lot of her work, she’s in a very interesting dialogue with art and authenticity and the relationship between the two and how they pull together and pull apart,” she says. “The film is about why we need art, why we make it, where it comes from, where it’s pulled from in your soul.”
Once Zhao was presented with the novel, she immediately connected to it on a spiritual level. “I felt her book was very immersive,” Zhao says. “It was a very visceral experience. It was a very poetic experience. It read almost like poetry to me, which is the type of cinematic language I love. As a filmmaker, when I was reading it, I was seeing images added together in a rhythm. I felt that there is a heartbeat in this book that matches the rhythm of the heartbeat of me as a filmmaker, and I also loved the story. I’m always looking for stories that are both very, very specific and universal at the same time, and this book really is that.”
“I was also very excited because the story touches on death and impermanence and grief and how the act of creativity and imagination could give meaning to the inevitable suffering that we go through in life,” Zhao continues. “When you have source material like that, it’s gold.”
Not only did she want to direct, but she also wanted to write the HAMNET screenplay together with O’Farrell. She sought to shed the typically stuffy trappings of a costume drama to instead create a film about love, loss and the healing power of great art as something visceral, raw and relatable.“Maggie has immersed herself so much [in this world] that she is the embodiment of all these characters, so collaborating with her was vital for me to be able to be inspired by the authentic world and these characters I have,” Zhao says. “There was just no question for me, I had to do that. And also, she’s an incredible writer. We were true partners.”
Zhao’s intention to faithfully translate the spirit of O’Farrell’s acclaimed work of historical fiction to the screen was present from the duo’s earliest conversations—the film was always intended to be one that devotees of the novel could very much embrace. Although the author was thrilled that HAMNET might hew so closely to her novel, O’Farrell concedes she personally felt some trepidation about reconstructing the story for film yet was delighted to discover her inner screenwriter.
“I know how to put down a narrative for the page and know how to put together the plot of a novel—that’s my job and that’s my heart,” she says. “But I had never written for the screen, and I wasn’t sure if I could do it. The mechanics of the narrative is different, the language is different, and the visual language is, of course, different. Something that appears on the page as an interior thought, you need as a scriptwriter to express that either through the visual language or the actual dialogue. That was a really interesting exercise.”
Despite working in different time zones, Zhao’s clear vision for the chronology of the narrative and for its characters helped propel the writing process. The director would often leave What’s App messages for her screenwriting partner that would help inspire revisions and rewrites; as they sent pages back and forth to one another, HAMNET eventually began to take on its final contours.
“You want the audience to see themselves in these characters,” Zhao says. “I want to try to open the hearts of the audience, soften them so they can feel the emotions these characters are feeling. Once they catch the wave with us, with our characters, then they have a chance to also experience catharsis. That’s always the creative goal of my films. Once they go through that catharsis, then they, like these characters, find some meaning from these difficult life situations, and hopefully become more whole through the experience of viewing the film.”
Readers familiar with Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet understand the hypnotic nature of her prose and the vivid detail with which she evokes every aspect of the Shakespeare family’s daily lives. A testament to the extensive research she completed before sitting down to write the novel, O’Farrell describes the tools of John’s workshop, the earthy aroma of Agnes’s garden, the scratching of Will’s quills against parchment.
Filmmaker Chloé Zhao was committed to capturing that same level of authentic detail on screen, and she partnered with expert craftspeople to ensure that the screen adaptation thrummed with the same kind of vibrant life as its source material. That group included two-time Oscar®-nominated cinematographer Łukasz Żal (The Zone of Interest, Ida), Oscar®-nominated production designer Fiona Crombie (The Favourite), costume designer Malgosia Turzanska (The Green Knight) and hair and makeup designer Nicole Stafford (Speak No Evil).
Building Character: Casting The Film
Even before the screenplay was completed, Zhao had strong ideas about the actors who might take on Hamnet’s immensely challenging leading roles. In fact, she’d informally met with two of them at the 2022 Telluride Film Festival. That year, Irish actors Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal had traveled to the Colorado mountains, each to promote a different film. For Buckley, it was the drama Women Talking, about a Mennonite community torn apart by sexual assault. For Mescal, it was the moving father-daughter drama Aftersun.
“Right from the beginning, Jessie was the actress that Chloé had in mind, and now, when you look at Jessie on screen, you can’t imagine anybody else playing that part,” producer Pippa Harris says of the character, who is so deeply rooted in nature and mysticism. “She embodies Agnes. She has a lot of her character within her. She loves the wilderness. She is quite a wild child in the sense that she’s very much at one with nature. She’s slightly mystical. She believes in the soul and the spirits, and she’s a really caring person—I think that that pulses out of her on screen.”
For her part, Buckley had an overwhelmingly positive response to both the story of Hamnet and to the character of Agnes. Reading the novel for the first time, she devoured the novel in one sitting, totally absorbed in the world O’Farrell had created and the magnetic figure at its center. Later, when she received the screenplay for the film, she was moved to tears. “I was like this is the woman I’ve been looking for,” Buckley says. “She is untethered, free, deeply curious, like a kind of rye whiskey, mischievous, hungry, beautiful soul of a woman. I just love her. She’s like one of those people I wanted to be my new best friend.”
In Will’s absence, Agnes gives John a wide berth and instead turns to her younger brother Bartholomew in moments of crisis. Played by Joe Alwyn (Harriet, The Brutalist), the farmer offers his sister his unconditional love and support. “They’re incredibly close, but they’re not together all the time,” says Alwyn of the siblings. “They’ve been almost forged together off the grid somehow in the forest. Bartholomew is both incredibly protective of her but also understands the strength of her well enough to not get in the way of what she is going to do. So, it’s this nice balance of protectiveness but also giving someone the space and freedom to grow.”
Credit: Agata Grzybowska / © 2025 FOCUS FEATURES LLC
As Will, Mescal had the unenviable challenge of humanizing a literary icon. “For hundreds of years, Shakespeare has become this person we hold up on a pedestal, but he must have had all these complicated urges within him to write from the place that he wrote,” Mescal says. “The thing that I had to do was make this character my own. I had to stick to the history, of course, but the main thing that I focused on was his work. The only thing that we really know is that these are the words he put on paper. That is his lived experience. If you dig into the meaning of certain soliloquies, you find the roots of who he is. That was where I put my attention.”
Studying Shakespeare’s words, then bringing his own unique energy to the role, helped Mescal craft a character who felt both real and relatable.
CHLOÉ ZHAO (Director, Co-Screenwriter, Executive Producer, Co-Editor) is a writer, director, editor and producer from Beijing. Her third feature Nomadland earned acclaims including Golden Lion at the 2020 Venice Film Festival, Golden Globe®️ , BAFTA, DGA, PGA Awards and 3 Oscars®️ , including Best Director, Best Actress and Best Picture. Chloé co-wrote and directed Marvel Studios’ Eternals. In 2023, she launched Book of Shadows, a production company, with producing partner Nic Gonda. Most recently, Chloé co-wrote and directed HAMNET starring Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley, to be released in 2025.
MAGGIE O’FARRELL (Co-Screenwriter) is one of the most loved writers in the English language. Her debut, After You’d Gone, marked the start of a career which has established Maggie as one of the great storytellers of our times. From that point onwards, Maggie has enjoyed critical acclaim and received numerous literary awards. The Hand that First Held Mine won the 2010 Costa Novel Award. HAMNET, which imagined the untold story of Shakespeare’s son, won the 2020 Women’s Prize for Fiction and was Waterstones’ Book of the Year, and was also a no. 1 bestseller. Her most recent novel, The Marriage Portrait, was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize. Maggie has recently co-written, with Chloé Zhao, the screenplay for HAMNET. The forthcoming film will star Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley and will be directed by academy-award-winner Chloé Zhao (Nomadland). Hamnet has previously been adapted for the stage by the Royal Shakespeare Company.Maggie is also the author of three books for children, Where Snow Angels Go, The Boy Who Lost His Spark and When the Stutter Came to Stay. She was born in Coleraine in Northern Ireland and grew up in Wales and Scotland. Currently, she lives in Edinburgh.
