Chloé Zhao brings audiences a new look at William Shakespeare with Hamnet. The film stars Jessie Buckley, Paul Mescal, Emily Watson and Joe Alwyn. Zhao also co-wrote the script with Maggie O’Farrell. Executive producers on the project include Kristie Macosko Krieger, Chloé Zhao and Laurie Borg. Liza Marshall, Pippa Harris, Nicolas Gonda, Sam Mendes and Steven Spielberg are all on board as producers.
The synopsis from Focus Features reads,
“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.”
Hamnet is a fictional novel depicting the life and times of Agnes, the wife of William Shakespeare. The story takes audiences through a tumultuous tale of shattered realities, loss, and heart-wrenching inspiration behind Shakespeare’s world-famous Hamlet.
Per Amazon, the official description for O’Farrell’s Hamnet reads:
England, 1580. A young Latin tutor—penniless, bullied by a violent father—falls in love with an eccentric young woman: a wild creature who walks her family’s estate with a falcon on her shoulder and is known throughout the countryside for her unusual gifts as a healer. Agnes understands plants and potions better than she does people, but once she settles on Henley Street in Stratford, she becomes a fiercely protective mother and a steadfast, centrifugal force in her young husband’s life. His gifts as a writer are just beginning to awaken when their beloved twins, Hamnet and Judith, are afflicted with the bubonic plague, and, devastatingly, one of them succumbs to the illness.
A luminous portrait of a marriage, a shattering evocation of a family ravaged by grief and loss, and a hypnotic recreation of the story that inspired one of the greatest literary masterpieces of all time, Hamnet is mesmerizing and seductive, an impossible-to-put-down novel from one of our most gifted writers.
Focus Features will release Hamnet from Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment in select theaters on Thanksgiving Day, November 27, before taking it wide on December 12.
Are you excited for this film? Will you be seeing it in theaters? Have you read the original novel in which it’s based? Sound off below!
