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Moviegoers needed a box of tissues nearby to watch Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet this past holiday season, and for good reason.
Based upon Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel of the same name, the book centers the family of William Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) as they dealt with the death of son Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe) as a child.
The acclaimed movie, which won Best Picture at the 2025 Golden Globes, was also an emotional experience for the cast and crew, as Mescal, O’Farrell and director Chloé Zhao told journalist Danielle Robay on the Jan. 20 episode of the Bookmarked by Reese’s Book Club podcast.
For Mescal, 29, stepping into the role of Shakespeare, who is never directly named in the novel, was “freeing.” In a sense, he could take on the role with little restriction, he explained.
“You’re kind of one of those mythical figures that we actually know very little about factually,” he said. “That becomes a more active way of building the character than, say, playing a historical figure that we have more information about.”
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“It gave me a freedom as an artist to [realize] you don’t have to experience this to do it,” he continued, adding that what he admires about Shakespeare is “how much of himself, as an artist, he was willing to share with an audience forever.”
One of Hamnet’s central themes is grief, particularly that of Shakespeare’s wife Anne (named Agnes in the film, and played by Jessie Buckley). O’Farrell, 53, was first inspired to write the novel after learning how little was known about the life and death of the couple’s only son, whose name was nearly identical to that of Shakespeare’s famous play, Hamlet.
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“That’s what artists do, is to build that bridge from these questions we have, [like], why isn’t he remembered? And how many decades later, here we are,” Zhao, 43, said. “It just felt like something much bigger is at work than us, and we’re just vessels and conjurers and chosen in the moment to carry out this work.”
In a December 2025 interview with PEOPLE, O’Farrell said she was taken by Zhao’s ideas for the project, especially since they didn’t come from a place of extensive Shakespeare knowledge. O’Farrell joined the project as a co-screenwriter alongside Zhao.
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“As a novelist, you’re a lone wolf,” O’Farrell told Robay. “You’re responsible for everything. On set, you realize that actually you are trusting that Paul and Jessie and Jacobi are going to put all the nuance that you have in your description in the novel into lines.”
Both O’Farrell and Zhao also discussed the film’s ending on the podcast, which takes place during the first performance of Hamlet at the Globe Theatre in London.
“In a novel, you can’t cut-and-paste large screeds of Shakespeare into a book. It just doesn’t work on the page; you can’t expect your readers to read through that,” O’Farrell said. “But in the film, we could completely let Shakespeare’s flag fly, and we could have whole speeches, and we could have costumes. We could have Paul coming on as the ghost … that for me is such a joy.”
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“Through making Hamnet, I had a spiritual experience in that Globe Theater,” Zhao added. “I got a taste of what eternity is like when the entire cast and crew are opening their heart and grieving together and sending strength towards Hamlet. And that physically showed me that in an embodied way what eternity is like. And that’s love.”
New episodes of Bookmarked by Reese’s Book Club drop weekly.
