by Gill Pringle in LA
Along with millions of readers, actress Jessie Buckley was enchanted by Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 best-seller about William Shakespeare and his wife Agnes, their son Hamnet dying, aged 11, from the bubonic plague.
The fictionalised story explores the profound grief experienced by his parents, and the impact of this loss on their family and on Shakespeare’s choice to write Hamlet.
Pretty much everyone in Hollywood realised the story’s potential, powerhouses Steven Spielberg and Sam Mendes signing on to co-produce the film and decided that Oscar-winning Nomadland director Chloe Zhao would be the perfect choice to bring this story to life.
And, as they had hoped, once Zhao was presented with the novel, she immediately connected to it on a spiritual level. “I felt her book was very immersive,” says Zhao. “It was a very visceral and poetic experience. It read almost like poetry to me, which is the type of cinematic language I love.
“As a filmmaker, when I was reading it, I was seeing images added together in a rhythm. I felt that there is a heartbeat in this book that matches the rhythm of the heartbeat of me as a filmmaker, and I also loved the story. I’m always looking for stories that are both very, very specific and universal at the same time, and this book really is that.
“I was also very excited because the story touches on death and impermanence and grief and how the act of creativity and imagination could give meaning to the inevitable suffering that we go through in life. When you have source material like that, it’s gold,” adds Zhao.
Likewise, Buckley had an emotional response to the story, moved to tears after reading Zhao’s script for Hamnet: “I was like – this is the woman I’ve been looking for. Agnes is untethered, free, deeply curious, like a kind of rye whiskey, mischievous, hungry, beautiful soul of a woman. I just love her. She’s like one of those people I wanted to be my new best friend,” says the actress.
On the first day of rehearsals, Zhao instructed Buckley (as Agnes) and Paul Mescal (as Shakespeare) to participate in a bizarre tantric workshop where Paul would embody a penis while Jessie embodied a vagina.
“There was an objective overview in my mind like, ‘OK, just surrender to this situation,’ but really it was like, ‘What’s going on?’” says the down-to-earth Irish actress, the eldest of five children growing up in County Kerry.
Penis and vagina exercises aside, she could easily immerse herself in the dynamics of a large family unit, taking part in group exercises to create the Shakespeare family clan.
So much so, that young actor Jacobi Jupe was sad to say goodbye to his screen parents. “Jessie and Paul, they instantly felt like my mum and dad, and I’m not even kidding. We’ve been like a real family,” says Jupe who plays Hamnet.
In turn, Buckley says, “Jacobi is such a clever, deep little man who knows exactly what is required of him and has such access to go somewhere so deep. He’s so special, my heart is just blasted open by him.”
A RADA graduate and acclaimed stage actress, Buckley is already celebrated for her roles in films Men, Wild Rose and Wicked Little Letters along with numerous TV roles including series Taboo, Chernobyl and Fargo.
And, having already earned an Oscar nod for her role in The Lost Daughter, her heart-wrenching performance in Hamnet is guaranteed to bring another slew of accolades.
If the film begins with the joy of falling in love, then – as fans of the story will know – it’s all building to an emotional crescendo, something that would initially be paralyzing for Buckley.
“We had ten days to shoot those scenes. The first four days, I didn’t know what to do. I was completely lost, and we had gone on this epic journey of the heart, in a way that was still mysterious to me. You know, you’re just in it, you’re just in the river, and it’s taking you, and then you’re meant to reach a climax at the end of this story, but also go to the Globe Theatre. Like, how do you go to the Globe Theater?!” she exclaims.
“I was nervous. But I got there, and I just felt completely lost, like it was too big. And then I realised that it was maybe essential and also necessary to be seen lost, not just as Agnes, but also as an actor, like it’s such a human experience to go on a journey and end up in an unknown and discover something of yourself.
“And so, for the first four days, I was like living in that space. And then I drove home kicking myself on the night of the third and I was listening to Max Richter’s “This Bitter Earth – On the Nature of Daylight,” which is a lyricised version of that song, and I sent it to Chloe, and it stuck with me all night, and I came in and it was like a tidal wave, I just realised I was in this place that was surrounded by people who like being in a theatre, and that actually my task after I got lost, was to surrender and to hold and be held by every single person around me in order to transcend the pain that was too much for Agnes to hold on her own and for it to live beyond the moment,” recalls Buckley, 36.
“And that is why Hamlet exists the way it does. It’s why all Shakespeare’s plays exist the way they do, because they contain the most heightened experiences of what it is to be human, and they help us transcend the bits of ourselves that are too big. And yeah, I just kind of got into the river and let it take me.”
Having recently become a mother in her own life, she feels even further attuned to the raw emotions of Agnes, who we see releasing a primal scream upon the death of her son. It’s so powerful you almost feel her grief reach out from the screen.
“My heart is cracked open in a way that you can’t really know until you’ve experienced what that is,” says the actress who today has a four-month-old baby with her mental health professional husband. “It’s an intense, wild ride of the heart but the most beautiful one.”
For all the success coming Buckley’s way, she couldn’t have done it without Mescal: “I love that man. I’ve been very lucky to work with great partners in my life. I think he might be the best…” she says, teasingly lowering her voice. “Don’t tell the others!”
Next up, she will play a very different kind of wife in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride! – an audacious reimagining of the Bride of Frankenstein.
Hamnet is in cinemas 15 January 2026, with previews this weekend.
