Hamnet, with Chloé Zhao and Maggie O'Farrell

Hamnet, the acclaimed novel by Maggie O’Farrell, is now a major film. The story imagines the life and death of Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet, and how this loss would later echo through one of his most famous tragedies, Hamlet.  O’Farrell joins director and co-writer Chloé Zhao to reveal how they adapted the novel for the big screen.

With Jessie Buckley as Agnes and Paul Mescal as William, the film reframes the Shakespeare family story as one of deep love, rupturing grief, and artistic creation. O’Farrell and Zhao discuss developing the screenplay together, interpreting Shakespeare as a husband and father, building the film’s immersive natural world, and shaping an unforgettable Globe Theatre sequence that anchors the emotional arc of the story.

O’Farrell and Zhao talk about adaptation, artistry, and how a 400-year-old loss continues to inspire new ways of imagining Shakespeare’s life and legacy.

Listen to Shakespeare Unlimited on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, Spotify, Soundcloud, or your favorite podcast platform.

From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published December 2, 2025. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the executive producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. We had help with web production from Paola García Acuña. Leonor Fernandez edits our transcripts. We had technical help from Hamish Brown in Stirling, Scotland, and Voice Trax West in Studio City, California. Final mixing services provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

Cholé 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. Cholé co-wrote and directed Marvel Studios’ Eternals. In 2023, she launched Book of Shadows, a production company, with producing partner Nic Gonda. Most recently, Cholé 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 beloved writers in the English language. Her debut, After You’d Gone, launched a career marked by critical acclaim and major awards. The Hand that First Held Mine won the 2010 Costa Novel Award. Hamnet, her reimagining of Shakespeare’s son, won the 2020 Women’s Prize for Fiction, was Waterstones Book of the Year, and became a no. 1 bestseller. Her most recent novel, The Marriage Portrait, was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize.

O’Farrell recently co-wrote the screenplay for Hamnet with Chloé Zhao. The forthcoming film, starring Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley and directed by Academy Award–winner Zhao (Nomadland), follows an earlier stage adaptation by the Royal Shakespeare Company. She is also the author of three children’s books: Where Snow Angels Go, The Boy Who Lost His Spark, and When the Stutter Came to Stay.

O’Farrell was born in Coleraine, Northern Ireland, grew up in Wales and Scotland, and now lives in Edinburgh.

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London’s First Playhouse and Shakespeare

FARAH KARIM-COOPER: From the Folger Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited. I’m Farah Karim-Cooper, the Folger director.

[Music fades]

KARIM-COOPER: Maggie O’Farrell’s bestselling novel Hamnet came out in 2020 and won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Women’s Prize for Fiction.

The book told the fictionalized story of the death of William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway’s son, Hamnet. And O’Farrell’s novel has had a long afterlife.

First, it was adapted into a stage play by Lolita Chakrabarti for the Royal Shakespeare Company. Now, a film adaptation is coming to theaters.

This version stars Jessie Buckley as Anne—although in O’Farrell’s telling, it’s pronounced “An-yiss.” Paul Mescal is William. And Jacobi Jupe plays Hamnet.

This version of Hamnet was co-written by O’Farrell and the movie’s director, Chloé Zhao. Zhao’s 2020 film Nomadland won the Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Director. In 2021, she directed the Marvel film Eternals.

Here are Maggie O’Farrell and Chloé Zhao, in conversation with Barbara Bogaev.

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BARBARA BOGAEV: Well, I want to start with you Maggie. It has been such a run. I mean, first you had the RSC production and now this film. I was thinking that your book is so much about the interior lives of Anne Hathaway, or Agnes, as you call her in the book. It’s all about what goes unspoken. So, were you convinced that it would even make a good play or a film or even be possible to adapt to the stage or screen?

MAGGIE O’FARRELL: Well, I think when I was writing the novel, it never really occurred to me that it would happen. You know, people have said to me, “Is it a dream come true?” and I just have to say, “Well, I never even thought it was possible. So, not really.”

But I think when Chloé and I sat down together to write the screenplay, I think we knew that that was going to be a large part of the job to make what’s interior in the novel, exterior, or at least audible or comprehensible to cinema audiences.

BOGAEV: Right, that was the big challenge. And Chloe, you initially turned down the offer to direct the story. Why? Did you also have doubts about whether it would make a good film?

CHLOÉ ZHAO: Well, I was in the car when they just gave me like a logline and I thought, “Well, I’m not sure I’ll be the right person.”

BOGAEV: What was the logline?

ZHAO: “Shakespeare and his wife lost their son, and then, it inspired Hamlet.” I thought, “Oh, so yes.” But the grief of losing a child, I’m like… I just, you know, I don’t even have children, so how can I do that? And then I met Paul Mescal, who said, “You have to read the book. It’s not what you think it is.” I read the book, and I realized, yeah, it’s about love. It’s about death. It’s about, you know, metamorphosis. It’s about so many things. So, I was really excited after I read the book.

BOGAEV: Oh, wow. Did you know Hamlet though? Had you read or seen the play?

ZHAO: I read some, yeah. [laughs]

BOGAEV: You’re laughing.

ZHAO: I’m laughing because you know, I didn’t grow up with this. I’m Chinese, and I’m just glad I can speak modern English somewhat decent now, and so, the Shakespeare language, if I’m honest, I don’t quite understand it. I can understand some of it. But Paul really helped me early on. He said that, “You don’t have to know exactly what every word means. When the Shakespeare play’s performed well, you’ll feel the meaning.” And that was really helpful for me.

BOGAEV: Did the novel then give you a different end to Hamlet?

ZHAO: To be honest, my only loyalty doing this is to Maggie’s book, right. His play is a part of it. I knew with Maggie, with Paul, Jessie, Emily, you know, there’s enough people that can help me access Shakespeare’s work but that is not where I hold everything to work on him as a character.

BOGAEV: Maggie, when you wrote the book, which lines and scenes did you read differently, seeing it through maybe this lens that Chloe now has, this lens of Shakespeare as a grieving father?

O’FARRELL: I think the connection for me between the death of Hamnet and Hamlet the play has always been the same. When I was at high school, we read the play when I was about 16 and I absolutely loved it. It got really under my skin as it does for a certain type of teenager, one who wears too much black and too much eyeliner—and I was definitely that kind of teenager.

BOGAEV: The goth side.

O’FARRELL: Yeah, yeah, exactly. I used to hang about in graveyards. We used to take black-and-white photos of each other, you know, draping ourselves on gravestones. That was me. So, I loved Hamlet.

My teacher mentioned in passing one day that Shakespeare had a son who’d been called Hamnet, and that he died four years or so before Shakespeare went on to write Hamlet. And even then, even though I was a really long way from being a writer, I knew that that was hugely significant. I knew that no one would casually give the name of their deceased son to a play and to a young man and to a ghost, most significantly. But I was always really baffled when I went on to university to study literature that nobody really talked about it, or nobody even really knew that Shakespeare had a son called Hamnet and that always made me baffled and also sad, you know, because I think this child died and his father grieved so much that he wrote a play in his name.

So, there’s so much of the play which I think resonates through Hamnet. You know, there’s Ophelia’s speech. There is the Ghost who is searching and searching for his son, you know, he appears and then he retreats. He appears and retreats until he finds Hamlet.

I remember saying that, actually, to you, Chloe, while we were in rehearsal. I said, “You know, the Ghost is looking for Hamlet” and it was like a light bulb that come on in your head. You went, “Okay, okay” and I could see that you were going to run with that idea.

And then, of course, the thing that I find most evocative is the Ghost’s speech about the leprous distilment and the way that it ravages him physically and the agony of it. It’s such an astonishing speech. I think of all the speeches in Shakespeare, it’s one of the most physical, and it’s the one that most vividly describes physical bodily agony. When you read contemporary accounts of what it was like to die of the plague, and you put them side by side, I just feel that somebody close to Shakespeare died of the plague or he watched somebody perhaps die of the plague because they’re so similar it can’t be a coincidence.

BOGAEV: Wow. So, Chloe, what were you thinking when that lightbulb went off when Maggie said that to you about the Ghost?

ZHAO: I mean, I was used to it by then, like there was so many lightbulbs

BOGAEV: With Maggie, I bet.

ZHAO: The life Maggie’s lived with Shakespeare, with this work, everything she was saying had made me go, “Ah, I can make this connection. I can make that connection.” It was vital from writing the script all the way to finishing filming.

BOGAEV: And Maggie, I was thinking you didn’t collaborate with Lolita Chakrabarti on the RSC’s stage adaptation of your book. What did you think when Chloe asked you? And had you ever co-written anything before?

O’FARRELL: No, not at all. I’d co-written shopping list with my husband. That was about it as far as it had gone. But actually, when I heard that Chloé Zhao was interested, I was really excited because I knew that she was not going to make a sort of costume drama, something that was very pristine and conventional. Having seen her films, you know—I didn’t know her then—but I knew that she was going to come at it from a really interesting angle.

I also knew that she wasn’t a Shakespearean and that really excited me, too, because I thought that’s as it should be because I didn’t really want a director who was going to make it all about him because this is a story about his whole family, you know? In the novel, he’s not named. In the novel, I wanted readers to approach him as a human being, not as this literary behemoth, as a kind of adjective. His name has become detached from him, in a sense, the actual human being that he was. So, I was really pleased because I thought Chloe is going to treat him as a human being and she’s going to treat it as a family story or as Agnes’ story or the children’s story.

Then I heard that she wanted to write screenplay with me, and so, I got on a Zoom call with her, and I was all prepared to say, “Actually, I’m really sorry. I don’t want to do it. I’m moving on to other stuff.”

BOGAEV: Why were you just moving on? Or were you afraid? Like “I can’t do this.”

O’FARRELL: No, I wasn’t afraid. I just kind of thought, you know, I’ve never written a screenplay. It’s not really my thing, and I’m going to write another novel. It just didn’t feel right. But Chloe is a very persuasive person. I got on the Zoom call, and we had a chat, and by the end of the Zoom I was shutting my laptop and I had agreed not only to collaborate with her, but also to write the first pass and send it in a couple of months.

BOGAEV: Oh, wow.

O’FARRELL: So, I did. I came off the call, and my husband said to me, “How did she take it?” And I said, “Actually, I changed my mind.” But I’m very glad that I did.

BOGAEV: What did she say? What really pushed you over the edge?

O’FARRELL: I remember you, Chloe, leaning close to the camera and brandishing the book and saying, “I want to make this.” And you slapped it with your hand. “I want to make this. I want to make a film of this.” So, I was kind of, “Wow. Okay. Alright.”

ZHAO: Well, I also said that… well, two things. One is, we both realized one of our favorite filmmakers is Wong Kar-wai—

O’FARRELL: Oh yeah, that’s right. Yeah, we did.

ZHAO: —which makes so much sense to me. Like In the Mood for Love, Happy Together, it makes more sense to me.

BOGAEV: Classic.

ZHAO: Yeah, exactly, because I realize Maggie also writes these very internal moments, very visually, like beat after beat, like a heartbeat. It’s the way Wong Kar-wai would edit his films. And he’s so good at using all these little details in daily lives. A touch, you know? A cup of water to, like, the weather to represent the internal landscape of the characters. The book is written that way, and I was really excited. And the other thing was that I basically told her I’m not doing the film unless she agrees.

BOGAEV: So, flattery slash threat.

ZHAO: I also have Steven Spielberg waiting, so, if she says no I’m going to have him call her.

BOGAEV: Oh, you had a plan B.

ZHAO: Yeah.

BOGAEV: Yeah, you could do worse than having Steven Spielberg as your plan B. Okay, so all of this collaboration happened on WhatsApp? How did that work?

O’FARRELL: Yeah, this is a film script forged in the crucible of WhatsApp. Chloé’s an amazing leaver of voice notes. She’s queen of voice notes.

Chloé was in LA mostly, and I was at home in Scotland, so it was quite a big-time difference. And so, I would often wake up in the morning and I would switch on my phone and I’d just hear this kind of ping, ping, ping, ping, ping, ping, ping. There might be maybe a dozen, 13 voice notes from Chloé talking about the film—some of which were really short, you know, 30 seconds to a minute, and the longest ever which she sent me was 58 minutes. It was a veritable podcast in itself.

But I think, you know, Chloé and I, I think have got very, very different skills but very complimentary skills in a way. Because Chloé is someone, I think, who—sorry Chloé, I’m talking for you as if you’re not here—who kind of works things out as she speaks. She kind of extemporizes and that’s how she works out her process or works out the way she feels or thinks about something. Whereas I’m the opposite. I need a pen and paper to work out how I feel or think about anything.

ZHAO: You’re right, Maggie. Like, sometimes I will start talking and then halfway through I would just say, “Never mind about those. What about this?” So, I do work it out while talking. A lot of times I will try to describe a scene that I’m looking for.

BOGAEV: Oh, can you think of an example for us?

ZHAO: Well, for example, there’s a scene where Agnes asked Hamnet, “What do you want to do?” Like, comforting him. And you know, I just described to Maggie, “I think we need a moment between the two of them where she tried to comfort him and maybe she can also see his future.”

[Clip from Hamnet]

AGNES: What do you wish to do, Hamnet? 

HAMNET: I should be one of the players with…a sword!

AGNES: A sword?

HAMNET: Yes, and I shall clash it against the sword of the other player.

AGNES: Show me. 

HAMNET: (acts it out)
There will be a terrible fight and everybody watching will be frightened out of their wits.

AGNES: And who will win?

HAMNET: I shall, of course!

AGNES: Of course, you shall

ZHAO: So, the play then inspired what happens in the scene, there was like a back and forth of the play feeding the life and vice versa.

BOGAEV: Oh, so organic. You know, as I was watching the film. I was looking for moments where you depart from the book because it is so faithful to the book. One of them is right at the beginning. The film opens with nature and just beautiful English countryside. Then, there’s this tree, which seems to be, I don’t know, Anne Hathaway—she’s called Agnes in the book. It’s like her totem tree. It’s this place she seems to feel most at home.

So, Chloé, what did you want to convey right from the start of the film about the role nature plays in the story? Because in the book, the book begins with Hamnet, the boy, the young boy, and we see everything through his eyes.

ZHAO: I actually struggled a lot with figuring out how to open the film. Earlier on, Maggie and I had agreed that this is going to be a linear story. Not starting on the day that he dies and going to flashback, just because it’s harder to do flashbacks in film. So, we had to find a new opening. Do we open with him? Do we open with her? It was a bit of a struggle.

But then I remember asking Maggie—this is another lightbulb moment—“Is there any music that you used to listen when you write the book?”

O’FARRELL: Yeah, it’s Henry Purcell “When I am laid in Earth” from Dido and Aeneas. It’s an incredible piece of music that’s instantly heartbreaking the minute you hear it. And it just builds and builds to this incredible chorus that repeats the same two words over and over again, which is, “Remember me. Remember me.”

[Clip from Dido’s Lament (“When I am laid in Earth”), the closing aria from Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, libretto by Nahum Tate. Sung by Anne Sofie von Otter for the 1989 recording with Trevor Pinnock and The English Concert.]

When I am laid, am laid in earth,
May my wrongs create
No trouble, no trouble in thy breast;
Remember me, remember me, but ah! forget my fate.
Remember me, but ah! forget my fate.

O’FARRELL: It’s not exactly written at the same time as Hamlet, but you know, I think 20, 30 years later, if I’m right, but I just wonder whether Purcell ever saw an early production of Hamlet and heard that line and maybe wrote that piece of music because it’s incredible. Anyway, I sent it to Chloé.

ZHAO: My brain exploded because the fact that this piece of music could have been written inspired by the real stage play at the time, the real production of Hamlet, to me, is just one of those things, those patterns, those synchronicities, I look for. I go “This is the direction.”

So, then when I heard the song, it is so clear to me that it’s going to be this grand, almost like church, like nature as a temple kind of shot. That piece of music says nature is the temple that she is born out of.

BOGAEV: Yes, and in the book, she does, she goes back into nature. And we should say her mother is a kind of Druid type person. Maybe her mother came out of the forest and she’s a healer, and Agnes is a healer as well, and she loses her mother early on. But when she’s pregnant and in labor, she goes back to this tree to deliver her babies. I mean, it’s just this amazing relationship this character has with the natural world that her husband, Shakespeare, doesn’t.

ZHAO: He’s yearning towards her. It is our modern society, our collective yearning, towards her and the part of ourselves that she represents. So, whatever that shot, that opening is, we have to fall in love with her and yearn for her.

BOGAEV: And we do! But Maggie, your book and the film, there’s just so much about grief I’m just kind of amazed. You’ve had these harrowing calls with death, and you talked a little bit about it when you were on the podcast before. But what happened? I mean, you almost died in childhood after getting encephalitis. Also, your daughter almost drowned once. And something happened to your son. What did he have? Meningitis? How did these experiences figure into your writing and into your collaboration with Chloé?

O’FARRELL: You know, I think near-death experiences are very universal. I think we’ve all had them. Obviously, some more than others, and some more dramatic than others. But there is a kind of recognition to that experience in all of us.

BOGAEV: And Chloé, what’s your experience with grief? Are these the kinds of conversations that you had with Maggie?

ZHAO: I think I knew about you and your daughter but I didn’t know about you and your son. Wow. Well, that’s your answer, Barbara. Didn’t talk about it.

BOGAEV: You didn’t talk about it? So, what was informing your understanding of this grief and the loss of a child? Because it seems like all of your films are about grief or loss of some kind. I guess you could say Nomadland is about the loss of a home. The Rider is about loss of identity after an accident. And your first film, Songs My Brother Taught Me, I think is about loss of, really, almost every kind.

ZHAO: Yeah, well, because of what that community had gone through.

BOGAEV: Yeah, it’s just this throughline for you, loss. Why is that?

ZHAO: I don’t think we can measure loss and grief by the thing that’s lost, right? Each person has a unique experience with that.

BOGAEV: Yes, which is the story you tell in this film: how Shakespeare had one way to deal with grief and his wife had another, and they just couldn’t see each other or be with each other through that.

ZHAO: What I would say is that looking back at 15 years trying to make films about grief and loss is because I have not really experienced a lot of the kind that Maggie had experienced myself. You know, I haven’t really lost anyone like that until recently or dealt with near death experiences.

But there is a restlessness, I think, that I always felt in my body, which is my own fear of death and my own fear of impermanence. I think I’ve arrived thanks to Hamnet—actually the process of making this film—of an understanding, of a more embodied understanding, that creation and destruction are the natural state of our universe and of our existence.

So, the inability for us to come to terms with that actually makes living not as full as possible, you know? To be so afraid of death, I was also afraid of love and life. So yeah, I think that was probably why I was making these films is because I’m trying to come to that understanding.

BOGAEV: Yes. I’m thinking it’s another way that our modern civilization really alienates us from that since we don’t see death the way Shakespeare and the way people in Shakespeare’s time did. You’re just surrounded by it in your home back then. So, well, first of all, I want to say I’m sorry for whatever loss you’ve had recently.

ZHAO: Thank you. The film helped. Making the film helped. I was very much… I loved living a parallel life as William Shakespeare. Using this film, it was very much what I needed to alchemize my own pain. Every day: “I feel you, Will.” [laughs]

BOGAEV: Wow, so intertwined with your creation. Well, I do want to ask you about your crew and your cast, and in particular, Jessie Buckley. I mean, she’s just incredibly moving in this film. Paul Mescal, no slouch either. But Jessie as Agnes, her rage and sorrow, it just seems to blot out the sun. So, what kinds of conversations did you have with her and with your other actors about grief?

ZHAO: No, not much. I tell them about what I feel, and then I very much let allow them into my life.

Jessie, I remember, read the book and had a massive physical reaction. So, she read the book in one night. She just lost it. I think what it is, is that she and I were on a similar journey in the sense that we have both repressed our inner Agnes, right? Like a lot of us have. We both have been on a journey of releasing her, you know? Let her come through us finally and try to live life, not just through Shakespeare, our inner Shakespeare, which is someone who tries to connect with the world just through our art.

BOGAEV: Right, transcend transcendently.

ZHAO: Exactly, but allow the feminine consciousness to come through where all the expressions, all the feelings, emotions, are allowed and expressed without shame. And we go, “Wow. Can we just be ourselves in our bodies and feel safe and accepted in the world?” We both were on that journey. I think to read about a character like that, we said, “Wow, if we can bring that to screen, we both knew that journey is going to change our lives.”

BOGAEV: I think that what really comes across—well, there are two things. First, she really feels everything viscerally and lets it out, and the second thing, which is so inspiring, is she doesn’t seem to care at all what the rest of the world thinks.

[Clip from Hamnet]

AGNES: What are you looking at?

WILL: …You.

AGNES: Why?

AGNES: I thought you were a man of words, master tutor.

BOGAEV: Maggie, I had to go back to your book to remind myself if Shakespeare was as inarticulate in your book as he is in the film—and maybe inarticulate isn’t the right word. Inexpressive, which is not unusual. People are often not able to express their grief. But how did you think about Shakespeare, the man, his ability to express his feelings as opposed to Shakespeare, the incredibly fluent and expressive writer?

O’FARRELL: Well, I think the characterization in the film is very much, you know, that was very much predicated on how Paul felt and the way he wanted to portray the character. I think he does an amazing job. He’s absolutely brilliant. I think, yes, he’s going to be a different, perhaps maybe slightly different Shakespeare to in the novel. I think in the novel, he’s more articulate. You know, I think all of us have a different Shakespeare inside our head, don’t we? We all have a different relationship with him and that’s okay. There are going to be myriad Shakespeares in the world and there should be.

BOGAEV: I’ve got to say, Chloé, the sets were so interesting. Particularly Shakespeare’s parents’ house where Agnes and Shakespeare and their children live for most of the film before Shakespeare gets wealthy and buys Agnes the house in Stratford, which she doesn’t really care about. So, how did you and your production designer Fiona Crombie conceive of the look of these interiors?

ZHAO: Well, you know, we try to think about contrast and the paradox of what happens. We wanted to both feel the oppression, you know? The feeling of being stuck in this place and in rules and in how one should behave and the silence of emotions, and feelings, and body movements, you know? The way we are stuck in our clothes.

But at the same time, we also wanted to show domesticity. Like, once it’s contained, there’s also like warmth. There’s also safety. There’s also depth. These people, their feelings about each other change now that they’re in this space together. So, it’s not black and white.

But one thing with Agnes entering the home without, nature comes with her. The human structure can’t stop nature from coming in with her. She’s bringing dirt. She’s bringing herbs. She’s bringing everything in.

And then, one more thing I would say is Fiona did something really interesting that you can’t quite see when you first walk in but there are all these little stains on the wall and these little missing pieces. There are scars of violence, generations of violence. You know, things are patched up after it’s broken—you know, things are, like, smashed against the wall and have to be cleaned up and that’s all over the house.

BOGAEV: Wow. I think you do feel that subliminally somehow. And Maggie, there’s also a glove making workshop because Shakespeare’s father was a glover and he works for his father in his youth. I read, apparently you spent a lot of time on the set as a writer, which is unusual but you spent a lot of time on the set of the glove making workshop, in particular. Why were you hanging out there?

O’FARRELL: I love the glove making workshop. That was one of my favorite bits of the whole set. Yeah, so Alice Felton and Fiona Crombie gave me a guided tour while it was all set up. I mean, it was great because I wanted to ask questions about every single knife and every single kind of mold and stitches and embroidery, so, the three of us hung out for quite a long time in the glove workshop.

BOGAEV: You nerded out on them.

O’FARRELL: Yeah, I really did. My kids told me recently—I’ve got teenagers—and they said I’m a “neek” which apparently is a cross between a nerd and a geek, which I really like as a word.

BOGAEV: Is that a compliment or not?

O’FARRELL: I don’t think it is, but I’m going to take it as one anyway, Barbara. [laughter]

So I did, I definitely was a big neek in the glove workshop just because it was just all… I mean it really felt so real. And the smell of it was so evocative, actually, which you can’t get from the film, you know? It smells of beeswax and leather and iron work and I mean, it was just a thing of great beauty.

BOGAEV: Wow. Well, the other thing that felt so real was the Globe Theatre. But Chloe, you built that as a set, and apparently, it’s a really complicated construction.

ZHAO: Well, I went to the Globe, the real Globe, thinking we were going to shoot there. And I had a panic attack when I got there because it looks so new. And it’s also massive and we couldn’t afford to fill that place up with extras because it’s very expensive to make a period film with extras because they all have to have costumes.

I remember crying there, just “I don’t know what to do.” Fiona held my hand and said, “Okay, just what’s the feeling that you want to have when you want Agnes to walk into the Globe?” I said, “I want her to look up and feel like she’s inside of a tree.” And she’s like, “I got this” and that’s where we started, you know? The idea of everything about the Globe Theatre in our story is Will’s tribute to the world Agnes showed him. So, it’s going to feel like the inside of a tree trunk.

BOGAEV: Oh, wow. Maybe we should explain just a little. I don’t want to give away the ending but for people who haven’t read the book: Shakespeare and his wife are just really not seeing eye to eye at all. He’s in London a lot. She’s at home and she thinks he’s writing a comedy after their son dies. But then she hears in a pretty brutal way that Shakespeare’s new play is a tragedy. Then she finds out that it’s got the name of her son and she is so furious. She goes to the Globe for the first time to see her husband’s play. And that’s why you created this immersive experience for her of being held by this wood. I mean, it’s such a mystery how to make something truly immersive, any kind of art. People do turn all the time to art for all kinds of comfort and for transcendence and for survival. They turn to creating it and experiencing it. I think that’s what this film is about in the end. But I am curious. I’ll start with you, Maggie. How have you experienced that in your own work, in your life?

O’FARRELL: Well, I think, ending the book and the film with Hamlet was always really important to me because as I was thinking about the book and writing it, I always asked myself, you know, “How would Agnes have felt?” How would anyone feel if your partner or your husband wrote a play giving it the name of your dead son? I don’t think I’d be very happy. I think I’d be really, really angry. There’s always, you know, a lot of debate in scholarship, I mean, whether or not she ever saw any of his plays but I just decided, “Well, if it happened, then of course she would do anything to get to London.” It was no mean feat going from Stratford-Upon-Avon to London at that time. It took three or four days. I’m sure she would’ve got herself to London to see it.

BOGAEV: And Chloé, where did you land with this idea? And where did you land yourself spiritually, I guess, after making this film?

ZHAO: I mean, to be in the Globe Theatre for those days and to stand there on stage and feel the audience’s grief together. To listen to the words of Hamlet and to see Paul giving that speech that Maggie was talking about and then to watch Agnes—

BOGAEV: Paul, as the actor, acting as the Ghost on stage.

ZHAO: Yes, that speech. This interexchange between what’s happening on stage and what’s happening off stage is truly, to me, that is the temple. I mean, that is religion, spirituality. That’s it. If you don’t have a traditional type of religion, place to go to, this is as close as it gets. It’s been with us since the beginning of our dawn of humanity. We’ve had this around the fire in the caves. I’ve experienced it myself. I’m a true believer on the alchemical power of storytelling.

BOGAEV: Oh, that is beautiful. But then you played Rihanna for your cast.

ZHAO: This is why when in old times, you know, warriors come back from war, they beat the drums and they dance around the fire.

BOGAEV: Yeah, they have a dance party.

ZHAO: It’s really simple. Emotion is energy and motion. You just got to move it, and so, that was… I really wish that video gets released one day.

BOGAEV: Oh, me too. You gave us music to go out on and I want to thank you both, Chloé and Maggie, for talking today. And thanks so much for the film.

O’FARRELL: Thank you. Thanks for having us.

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KARIM-COOPER: That was Chloé Zhao and Maggie O’Farrell, interviewed by Barbara Bogaev.

Hamnet opens in theaters everywhere on December 5.

This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the executive producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. We had technical help from Christophe Zajac-Denek in Los Angeles, and Voice Trax West in Studio City, California. Our web producer is Paola García Acuña. Leonor Fernandez edits our transcripts. Final mixing services provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

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