Chloé Zhao Assembles Cast of ‘Hamnet’ With Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley
After going silent for over a year since the release of Marvel Studios’ Eternals, Chloé Zhao is getting her next project ready, an adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet, and we just learned that Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley are in talks to lead.
Deadline broke the news earlier this week about Mescal and Buckley, two of Hollywood’s rising stars and recent Oscar nominees. Hamnet was written by Maggie O’Farrell and published in 2020 by Tinder Press; it went on to become a New York Times best-seller. It’s a historical fiction novel focused on Agnes, the wife of William Shakespeare, and her struggles to deal with the recent loss of their 11-year-old son; it’s the story that set as the backdrop to Shakespeare’s writing Hamlet.
Here is the official synopsis for the novel:
On a summer’s day in 1596, a young girl in Stratford-upon-Avon takes to her bed with a sudden fever. Her twin brother, Hamnet, searches everywhere for help. Why is nobody at home?
Their mother, Agnes, is over a mile away, in the garden where she grows medicinal herbs. Their father is working in London.
Neither parent knows that Hamnet will not survive the week.
Hamnet is a novel inspired by the son of a famous playwright: a boy whose life has been all but forgotten, but whose name was given to one of the most celebrated plays ever written.
Mescal is the name in everyone’s mouth right now, after delivering a career-making performance in Aftersun, getting an Oscar nomination for it, and then getting one of Hollywood’s most coveted roles, the lead in the upcoming Gladiator sequel by Ridley Scott. (Wishful-thinking twitter users have also placed him as Marvel’s Johnny Storm, something that is quite unlikely to happen.) Buckley is not slowing down either, and was most recently seen in the multiple-nominated Women Talking. Next up, she will be in Wicked Little Letters along with Olivia Colman, as well as Christos Nikou’s sci-fi romance Fingernails.
No release date has been set for Hamnet. Chloé Zhao is directing and co-writing the script along with O’Farrell. Amblin Pictures is also developing.
Miguel Fernández is a Spanish student that has movies as his second passion in life. His favorite movie of all time is The Lord of the Rings, but he is also a huge Star Wars fan. However, fantasy movies are not his only cup of tea, as authors like Scorsese, Fincher, Kubrick or Hitchcock have been an obsession for him since he started to understand the language of filmmaking. He is that guy who will watch a black and white movie, just because it is in black and white.
