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In Chloe Zhao’s Hamnet, Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal went on an emotional ‘epic journey’
Mescal and Buckley’s performances in Hamnet, nominated for six Golden Globe awards, have been hailed as among the best of the year
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During the emotionally wrecking final scene of Hamnet, Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal had an issue.
“There were moments where the camera was obstructing us,” Buckley recalls. “We were like: ‘No, we have to see each other.’
“And then the minute we did see each other, it was like ‘Oh, no,’” Mescal says, laughing. “What a glorious thing.”
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In Hamnet, Chloe Zhao’s adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s prize-winning 2020 novel, Mescal plays William Shakespeare and Buckley his wife, Agnes. It is a fictional, speculative drama with a basis in historical fact.
One of the couple’s three children, Hamnet, died in 1596 at the age of 11. Within a handful of years, Hamlet would premiere at the Globe Theatre in London. The names, scholars have noted, were essentially interchangeable in 16th-century England.
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Zhao’s film imagines the possible connection between the death of Shakespeare’s son and the birth of one of the playwright’s greatest works. It is a portrait of a marriage, in grief and literary greatness. In many ways, it is also a movie about seeing and being seen.
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