Video: ‘Hamnet’ | Anatomy of a Scene

Hi, I’m Chloé Zhao. I am the director of “Hamnet.” This is when Agnes, who’s played by Jessie Buckley, comes to the Globe Theater to see her husband, William Shakespeare, played by Paul Mescal, his play, “Hamlet,” inspired by their son, Hamnet, who had passed away. “Look at me.” And in that moment, she realizes that he wrote this play to process and to express his grief for the loss of their son. For Maggie O’Farrell, the author of the novel “Hamnet,” and who is also my co-writer, when we were working on the screenplay, the entire script was moving towards this very moment. And to create Will’s character as the ghost, Our costume designer, Malgosia Turzanska, and our hair and makeup artist, Nicole Stafford, they traced his character arc where Will was wearing blue when we first met him. He wears different shades of blue throughout the film, but as life drains the color out of him, it’s almost as if he was calcified and he becomes colorless and gray and ashy and crusty, and he’s covered by this ashy paint that he will eventually, at the end of this scene, finally take off. So Nicole had the idea of painting Hamlet’s hair gold instead of using a wig. I thought that was really interesting to use paint, and same as Malgosia painting the linen of all the character’s costumes by hand. And this idea is consistent with the paint on Will’s face, the idea that the veil between what is real and what isn’t real is just one thin layer of paint away from each other. And the power of allowing ourselves to be seen is an incredibly vulnerable experience that can allow catharsis to occur, which happens at the end of this scene.