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William Shakespeare\u2019s name isn\u2019t spoken for quite a while in Hamnet<\/em>. Instead, we get to know the man that Agnes falls in love with: a gentle if stoic artist who\u2019s 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. \u201cPaul\u2019s performance may be more restrained, but you feel that, without him, there\u2019s no her,\u201d Zhao says. \u201cJessie and Paul as two actors were extremely giving to each other in that way.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s no mean feat to step into the shoes of Shakespeare and to bring so much humanity to him, and that\u2019s what Paul, as a person, threads,\u201d Buckley adds. \u201cHe has this greatness about him in an old-school way, like Richard Burton had. He\u2019s got a weight that is bigger than his years, and you can really lean on it. Working with him, I was like, \u2018Oh, I want to meet you so many times in my life in different ways and work together.\u2019 It felt so alive. Anything was possible.\u201d<\/p>\n After Hamnet\u2019s death, Agnes and William lead parallel lives\u2014Agnes 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<\/em> absorbs this idea as its own. Zhao found that this version of Hamlet<\/em>\u2019s creation was not dissimilar from how she should make her own movie. Things got meta.<\/p>\n \u201cWe created a working environment where our own lives and what we were dealing with as human beings\u2014not just artists\u2014were allowed to be projected onto the art we were making,\u201d Zhao says. \u201cThat 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.\u201d<\/p>\n Which brings us back to the ending, and what the Hamnet<\/em> team discovered together on those last days. One small gesture inside the Globe transforms the tenor of the play, and in turn, of Hamnet<\/em>. \u201cWe were all waiting for this moment,\u201d Zhao says. \u201cDid Hamlet<\/em> actually have this moment in the original production? Maybe, maybe not\u2014we don\u2019t know\u2026. But by the time we got there, the veil between past and future, real life and fiction, was very, very thin.\u201d<\/p>\n Hamnet will screen at the Toronto International Film Festival before it\u2019s released in US theaters on November 27. This feature is part of Awards Insider\u2019s exclusive fall film festival coverage,<\/a> including first looks and exclusive interviews with some of the biggest names set to hit Venice, Telluride, and Toronto.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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