Art imitates life imitates art in Hamnet trailer

Paul Mescal is our Shakespeare, alternately a playful father and a grieving playwright. Jessie Buckley plays William’s wife Agnes, who brings another meta layer to the movie. Just as Macbeth‘s witches prophesied the future, “The women in my family see things,” Agnes says in the Hamnet trailer. Agnes and William’s visions manifest in different ways, and their emotional journeys take them in different directions. Speaking with Variety, Zhao said her goal was to give the audience a “safe space” to process their own feelings through the Shakespeares. “If we can all trust that every one of us has the ability to alchemize all the pain we had experienced in life—sometimes it doesn’t make any sense—but it’s not just William Shakespeare. We all have that ability,” she explained.

Buckley told the outlet she “would never want to experience what Agnes experiences.” But every actor alchemizes some of their own personal journey into a character, and the journey of the character affects them in return. Asked how Hamnet impacted her views on motherhood (having recently given birth to her first child), Buckley said, “I don’t know if anything really fully prepares you completely for motherhood. What it unlocked in me, what I was looking for as a woman, was a tenderness, which led me towards becoming a mother in some shape or form.”