Hamnet

There is a moment in Hamnet when Agnes Shakespeare — healer, beekeeper, wife, mother, and the woman history chose to erase — stands alone in a field while her children's laughter floats across the distance. The camera stays on Jessie Buckley's face. Nothing happens, in the way that cinema's greatest moments are often defined by nothing happening: the air shifts, the light changes, and something passes across those extraordinary features that you could spend a week trying to name. It is the look of a woman who knows, deep in her body, that something is coming. That the world is about to change its shape. That grief of an incomprehensible kind is already somewhere on the road, walking toward her.

Chloé Zhao's Hamnet is, by any reasonable measure, the film of the 2025 awards season. It swept into Toronto International Film Festival and walked out with the People's Choice Award — one of the most reliable Oscar predictors in existence — and has not stopped collecting prizes since. Based on Maggie O'Farrell's 2020 Baileys Women's Prize-winning novel, co-written by O'Farrell herself alongside Zhao, and built upon a performance from Jessie Buckley that may be the finest of her generation's careers, it is the rare film that does exactly what the very best literature does: it takes one woman's private sorrow and makes it feel like the sorrow of everyone who has ever loved anyone.

This is the story of Agnes Shakespeare. You do not know her name. History never wanted you to.

The Novel: Maggie O'Farrell's Hamnet and the Book That Changed Everything

Before there was a film, there was the novel, and before you can understand what Zhao and O'Farrell accomplished on screen, you have to understand what made the book a phenomenon.

Maggie O'Farrell published Hamnet in March 2020 — by cruel coincidence, exactly as the world went into lockdown. A novel about grief and plague arriving during a moment of global grief and plague. The timing felt either impossibly wretched or cosmically inevitable, depending on your disposition. What happened next was neither: the book became one of the great publishing events of the decade. It won the Women's Prize for Fiction. It became a global bestseller. It was translated into dozens of languages. It sat on every "books of the decade" list before the decade was even halfway done.

O'Farrell's central conceit is audacious in its simplicity. In 1596, William Shakespeare's only son, Hamnet, died aged eleven — almost certainly of bubonic plague. Four years later, Shakespeare wrote Hamlet. Why did he name the play after his dead son? No one knows. History, which recorded virtually everything about William Shakespeare that could be recorded, left no answer. O'Farrell's novel suggests that the answer lies not with William at all, but with Agnes — and that the truest memorial to Hamnet Shakespeare is not one of the most famous plays ever written, but the love of the woman who raised him.

The novel's structure is its masterstroke: O'Farrell moves fluidly between Agnes's courtship, her marriage, her years of raising three children alone while William was away in London becoming immortal, and the terrible summer of 1596 when plague arrived in Stratford and took her son. The prose is incantatory, elemental, written with a kind of fierce tenderness that feels genuinely new — as if O'Farrell had invented a way of writing about motherhood and grief that simply hadn't existed before.

O'Farrell herself has spoken about the years of research behind the novel — into bubonic plague's devastation, into Tudor herbalism and women's medicine, into the legal records and church registers that reveal Agnes Hathaway's real life in fragmentary form. What emerges is a portrait of a woman who was, by all accounts, genuinely extraordinary: older than William, more educated in the ways of the natural world, widely respected as a healer, and almost entirely absent from every subsequent account of the man she married. The novel's anger at that erasure — held under tight discipline, never polemical, always channeled into vivid, particular, human detail — is one of its great qualities.

The Woman History Forgot: Agnes Shakespeare and the Film's Radical Heart

To call Hamnet a feminist film is both accurate and insufficient. It is a film about what it costs to be the woman behind the man — specifically, the woman behind the most mythologized man in the English language — and it refuses, on every frame, to romanticize that cost.

Agnes Shakespeare, née Hathaway, was real. She was born around 1556, making her eight years older than William. The church records and legal documents that survive tell us a few things: she was left a substantial bequest in her father's will, separately from her siblings, suggesting she was valued and trusted in ways that were not standard for women of the period; she married William in November 1582 when she was already pregnant; she remained in Stratford for virtually all of her adult life while he was in London; and she outlived her husband by seven years, dying in 1623. Everything else — her interior life, her grief, her love, her loss — was nobody's business and nobody recorded it.

O'Farrell and Zhao between them constructed, from those fragments and from deep historical imagination, a woman who is not a symbol but a specific, particular person. Agnes in the film moves through the world in a way that feels genuinely different from the conventions of period drama: she reads omens in the flight of starlings; she keeps bees and talks to them; she can diagnose illness with her hands; she is not mysterious in a coy, romantic way but in the way that people who attend closely to the natural world often seem mysterious to those who don't. Jessie Buckley plays all of this with complete commitment and without a trace of affectation. She makes Agnes as real as anyone you've ever known.

The film's radical act is its choice of perspective. William Shakespeare does not appear for the first forty minutes. When Paul Mescal's William does arrive, he is rendered with warmth and clarity — Mescal ensures he is never a villain — but he is definitively not the center of this story. He is the person who leaves. He is the person who turns his grief into art. He is the person who gets to be immortal.

Agnes is the person who stays.

How Chloé Zhao Came to Direct: The Paul Mescal Connection

The story of how Hamnet came to be made is itself the kind of story you'd put in a film about creative collaboration, if you could. It begins, improbably, with a conversation at the Telluride Film Festival, and it hinges on an actor going to bat for a director who had initially said no.

Chloé Zhao passed on Hamnet. She has been candid about this: when the project first came to her, she did not feel a personal connection to it. The Shakespeare world felt distant; the period, the subject matter, the expectation of what a literary adaptation should be — none of it immediately struck her as something she needed to make. She passed.

Then Paul Mescal got involved. Mescal, already attached to the project, had a different conviction. He had read the novel, understood what it could be, and had a clear sense of what the film needed to become. He met Jessie Buckley and Chloé Zhao at Telluride and made the case. There is something appropriate about the actor who would play William Shakespeare — the man whose genius for persuasion and for capturing human truth on the page is legendary — being the person who persuaded the film's director that she was the right person for it.

What changed Zhao's mind was a story Buckley told her about her first job: working at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in London. It was an epic of a story, by Zhao's account — the kind of story that takes a long time to tell and leaves you understanding something new about both the teller and the subject. Zhao listened, and something clicked. She had come in without an affinity for Shakespeare. She left with one — or more precisely, she left with an affinity for the world that Shakespeare had emerged from, and for the woman who had shared it and been written out of it.

The director of Nomadland, The Rider, and Eternals signed on. The rest, as they say, is history — which is exactly the right phrase for a film about the people history chose to ignore.

The Cast: Buckley, Mescal, and the Ensemble Around Them

Jessie Buckley was born in Killarney, County Kerry, Ireland, and trained at the Royal Academy of Music. She came to wider attention in Wild Rose, broke through to international stardom with I'm Thinking of Ending Things and The Lost Daughter (which earned her her first Oscar nomination, for Supporting Actress), and has since established herself as perhaps the most fully realized screen actress of her generation — someone whose work carries an unbroken thread of interior life regardless of the role's demands.

To play Agnes, Buckley did not read the novel until after her first conversation with Zhao. This was deliberate: she wanted to arrive at the character through the film's specific conversation between director and actor rather than through the book's version. What happened when she did eventually read it became one of the production's defining stories: she stayed up the entire night and read it in one sitting. By morning, she had wept and laughed and felt something she described as a collision — the book, the moment, her life, the director, all meeting at a single point.

Paul Mescal's William is the film's crucial counterbalance: a man who is unmistakably loving, unmistakably brilliant, and unmistakably wrong about what grief requires. Mescal plays him without apology and without condemnation, and the scenes between Buckley and Mescal crackle with the electricity of two performers working in complete creative trust. That trust, as it happens, was not built only in front of the camera.

"We'd Just Dance": Buckley and Mescal's Extraordinary Bond

Before production began, Buckley and Mescal found themselves in New York at the same time — she working on one project, he on another. They discovered, somewhere in the months before cameras rolled, a shared need for a particular kind of release. They started going dancing together at a club called Joy Face.

They would go to Joy Face and dance. No conversation required. Just movement, and music, and the knowledge of the work ahead. "We'd just dance," Buckley has said. "No conversation really needed." It sounds simple, and it was: the simplest possible foundation for the kind of trust that the most demanding scenes in the film required.

There is a school of thought — held by directors who work in performance-intensive drama — that the bond between two actors on screen is almost never built in rehearsal rooms or in the pages of the script but in the ordinary life that happens around the work: the meals together, the walks, the late-night conversations that drift away from the film, the apparently trivial shared experiences that create, somehow, a shorthand and an ease that translates directly to the camera. Joy Face was that place for Buckley and Mescal. By the time they arrived on set to play out the marriage of Agnes and William Shakespeare — the courtship, the tenderness, the grief, the distance that grows between two people who love each other but who express that love in entirely different languages — they already knew each other in the way that the film required.

The two most emotionally extreme scenes in the film are Hamnet's birth and Hamnet's death. These scenes, for the obvious dramatic reasons, belong entirely to Buckley. Mescal was not on set for either of them. What Zhao observed — and what she has described as "almost spiritual" — is that Mescal was so completely connected to Buckley's experience, so present to the emotional reality of the film even when absent from the physical set, that his absence from those scenes feels intentional in a way that mirrors the film's thematic argument: William is always, in some essential sense, not there. Agnes is always, in some essential sense, alone with it.

The Locations: Tudor England Rebuilt in Herefordshire

One of the quiet miracles of Hamnet is where it was made. Production designer and the locations team made choices that were, by the conventional logic of period filmmaking, somewhat counterintuitive. They did not go to Stratford-upon-Avon. They went, instead, to a corner of England where the Tudor period never entirely let go.

Principal photography ran from July 29 to September 30, 2024, primarily across Wales and Herefordshire. The compressed shooting schedule — just nine weeks for what was already one of the most technically ambitious British productions in years — required a degree of preparation and creative efficiency that the production team have consistently cited as extraordinary.

O'Farrell on Set: What Happens When the Author Writes the Script

There is a long and undistinguished history of novelists being brought in to adapt their own books for film and finding the process dispiriting, or having their work substantially rewritten by other hands, or simply delivering a script that the director then has to make practical and cinematic through sheer directorial force. What happened with O'Farrell and Zhao is something genuinely different.

O'Farrell and Zhao co-wrote the screenplay together, and by all accounts it was a true collaboration — not a polite one in which a celebrity author is nominally credited while a studio screenwriter does the actual work, but a genuine meeting of two creative minds who trusted each other and brought different things to the table. O'Farrell understood the emotional and historical architecture of the novel at a molecular level: which scenes were load-bearing, which details were arbitrary and expendable, where the book's temporal structure would need to be reconfigured for cinema. Zhao understood what the camera could do that the prose couldn't, and what it couldn't do that the prose took for granted.

The result is a screenplay that feels, more than most adaptations, as if it grew from the same root system as the book while being its own distinct thing. There are sequences in the film that do not exist in the novel and that feel essential to the film — images and moments that Zhao found specifically through the visual language of cinema. There are sequences from the novel that O'Farrell cut from the screenplay, presumably because they depended on interiority that prose can provide and film cannot. The screenplay is, by the standards of literary adaptation, a model of what intelligent collaboration between a director and an author can produce.

O'Farrell was also present on set throughout the shoot — not as a presence of authority or oversight, but as a creative resource and, by the cast's account, a warm and generative one. Buckley has spoken about the experience of working on material where the original author was genuinely present and available, not as someone guarding her text but as someone genuinely excited to see what it could become. That openness, that collaborative spirit from the person who had the most invested in the source material, set the tone for the entire production.

The Awards Sweep: Jessie Buckley's Dominant Season

The 2025–26 awards season arrived with many strong candidates for Best Actress. By the time the ballots closed, there was really only one conversation.

Buckley won the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Motion Picture — Drama. She won the BAFTA for Best Actress in a Leading Role. She won the Critics' Choice Award for Best Actress. The trifecta of the major precursor prizes, in a single season, from a single performance. She received a Screen Actors Guild nomination. Irish arts awards. Everywhere the profession looked at the work of the year in screen acting, it found itself looking at the same face, in the same performance, in the same film.

The TIFF People's Choice Award deserves particular attention as a predictor. Since 2003, the People's Choice Award at Toronto has gone to the eventual Best Picture Oscar winner more often than not. Recent recipients include Nomadland (Best Picture winner), Green Book (Best Picture winner), and La La Land (Best Picture nominee that lost to Moonlight). The award reflects the taste of a general festival audience rather than specialized critics, which makes its alignment with Oscar results all the more striking. When Toronto's general audience votes Hamnet the film of the year, they are voting for the same thing Oscar voters will consider: the film's emotional directness, its commitment to its characters, its fundamental seriousness about what cinema can and should do.

Chloé Zhao's Second Act: Making History Twice

Chloé Zhao won the Academy Award for Best Director in 2021 for Nomadland. In doing so, she became the first woman of color to win the category, and only the second woman in Academy history to win it. She was the second director in a row — following Bong Joon-ho's victory for Parasite — to win for a film made almost entirely outside the traditional studio system, with largely non-professional actors, in a mode closer to documentary naturalism than prestige Hollywood filmmaking.

Nomadland was extraordinary. It was also, unmistakably, a certain kind of film: intimate, American, built on Frances McDormand's remarkable presence and the vast, austere beauty of the American West. It raised an immediate question that surrounded Zhao through her subsequent work: what happens when she goes bigger? When she takes on scale, studios, franchise material?

The answer, after the mixed reception to EternalsHamnet reveals is that this sensibility translates beautifully to period drama, provided the period drama is actually about human interiority rather than spectacle. The Herefordshire fields that stand in for Tudor England look exactly like the kind of place that Zhao's camera has always loved: wide, elemental, full of light that seems to carry historical weight.

With an Oscar nomination for Hamnet, Zhao becomes the first woman of color nominated twice for Best Director. Her body of work — Songs My Brothers Taught Me, The Rider, Nomadland, Hamnet — is already one of the most significant directorial careers to emerge in the past decade. If she wins for Hamnet, she will be the first person ever to win Best Director twice for films about women reclaiming the stories that history denied them.

There is something satisfying about that potential outcome. Zhao has spent her career telling the stories of people who exist at the edges of what the mainstream considers worth telling: nomadic Americans living in vans, Native American rodeo riders, now a Tudor woman whose name barely survived the centuries. The Academy, in recognizing Nomadland and in recognizing Hamnet, is recognizing a filmmaker whose instinct is always to go toward the people and stories that power has chosen to overlook. Agnes Shakespeare would likely understand that instinct very well.

Why This Film Matters: Agnes, the Pandemic, and What We Keep

It is worth remembering that O'Farrell wrote her novel during the months before the pandemic — finishing it just as the world began to shut down — and that the book emerged into a world in which the relationship between plague and grief was no longer merely historical. The bubonic plague that kills Hamnet in the novel is clinically described, meticulously researched, and rendered with a precision that was, in 2020, no longer quite as remote as it might have felt in 2019.

The film arrives in 2025, and the pandemic is now far enough away to feel historical and close enough to still ache. Hamnet's central argument — that the way people grieve is determined by who they are, what they have, and what they're allowed, and that the people with the least power over their circumstances often carry the most grief in silence — resonates with the particular texture of the years we have all just lived through.

Agnes cannot transform her grief into art, into words, into something that will outlive her. She has no Globe Theatre. She has no quill. She has what she has always had: the world immediately around her, the bees and the herbs and the fields, the daughter who survived and the marriage that is straining under the weight of an unspeakable loss. William channels his grief into Hamlet, and Hamlet will be performed for another thousand years. Agnes channels her grief into surviving, and for four hundred years, nobody knew her name.

Chloé Zhao and Maggie O'Farrell and Jessie Buckley have, between them, given her back her name. That feels, in the context of what this film has been trying to do, exactly right.

Official Trailer

Where to Watch Hamnet

The film is available to stream now ahead of the 98th Academy Awards ceremony on March 15, 2026.

Further Reading and Coverage