Hamnet's Moving Portrayal of Grief Feels Both Timeless and Timely

0:03Hello and welcome to Little Gold Men Vanity Fair's podcast for film, TV, and awards lovers. I'm David Canfield. I'm Richard Lawson. I'm Rebecca Ford. And I'm Hillary Busis. Hillary is back because we're doing another book club episode and when we read, Hillary's here. I'm going to take that as a compliment. Not like, this is the nerd episode, so here's that dork Hillary who likes books. Maybe it's both. We're all dorks today. We are discussing Hamnet, the novel by Maggie O 'Farrell. Maggie also co-wrote the screenplay for the upcoming film, directed by Chloe Zhao, and she'll be joining us later on in the episode, too.

0:43The film is going to the Toronto Film Festival. We have inferred on this podcast, based on the language of that premiere, that it is also maybe going to Telluride, So a big rollout for that movie soon to come. The film adaptation stars Jesse Buckley as Agnes Shakespeare and Paul Meskel as William Shakespeare. We'll talk more about that later. But first, let's dive into the book, which was published a few years ago. And a friendly reminder for those who did not listen to our previous Book Club episode or who have not yet read this book, we will be discussing it in detail through to the ending. So that is your spoiler warning.

1:17and full disclosure this was one of my favorite books of 2020 the year it was published I reread it for this episode and it remains in my view pretty special so who wants to start and summarize the book a little bit for us yeah as you mentioned it is about William Shakespeare and his wife Agnes most commonly known as Anne yes although William is never named in the book we infer from context clues who were kind of following for part of the story but it's about essentially the death of their son, Hamnet, who O 'Farrell posits was the somewhat inspiration for Hamlet. But it also kind of has multiple timelines.

1:53There's one weird journey following a flea's trajectory from a Venetian boat all the way to England and thus spreading the plague. And it's really interior and poetic as it looks at grief and love and to some extent art. I love it so much. Yeah, I loved it too. I cried so hard quite often while reading this book. I think the way she captures grief is so beautiful. Her writing is just so gorgeous and empathetic, and it really, really makes you feel. I was a big fan of her memoir that I read a while ago, but I had actually never read Hamnid, and I just found it really, really affected me. I really loved it.

2:36Yeah, I don't want to be this person, Rebecca. I don't know. You might agree with me, but I feel like as a parent, it probably does kind of hit different. Yeah. I know. I'm often that person on this podcast. And yeah, I felt this. I mean, sometimes I had to like put it down and take a break. It's too much. Yeah. Just imagining what that must be like is a really tough mind space to put yourself in. Well, as a former playwright, I related to it too. So, okay. As a glove maker. Yeah, exactly. I have to recommend listening to Jessie Buckley read it to you, which is what I did. Oh, wow. She recorded a new version of the book.

3:14I think timed obviously to the release of the movie in the fall. And she does it beautifully. And I think the poetry of O 'Farrell's writing, she really makes that sing. And all of the granular detail about life, you know, in the late 16th century and all of the imagination she pours into, you know, pretty much sketchily known history. I mean, we don't really know anything about these people in real life, but she just imagines so much for them. And Buckley really brings that to life. And it seems plausible. I'm not an Elizabethan scholar or anything, but reading this, it does seem like this could have been what happened.

3:49I think it's very meticulously researched, you know, to the degree that it can be, while also leaving the kind of room for imagination and character that is just sort of essential to any great work of fiction. I do remember first reading this book in the summer of 2020. The resonance was kind of overwhelming. I'm curious what you guys made of that part of the story now. Now, this is a story about grief resulting from a pandemic. This is about a really intimate view of what it is like to experience that. And I still found myself really shaken by that, even a few years out of it, just kind of bringing me back to that time of reading this book and feeling so unnerved by it, even though obviously it's sent many centuries ago.

4:38Yeah, I think it's something like back in those days, is like one in four children didn't survive to adulthood or something because of disease and things like that. And I think thinking about the past and it was brutal and they were executing people left and right and children were dying and there were plagues and all that stuff. You kind of become desensitized to individual humanity. But then you read Shakespeare's plays and there's so much of it. There's so much grief. There's so much love. I think people are by and large the same, at least emotionally now as they were back then. And I think this book really, you know, makes that argument very powerfully, where we tend to sort of safely put the past at a really far removed and imagine them as wholly different beings almost.

5:22And I think O 'Farrell insisting the humanity into these people with relatable emotion goes a long way toward sort of further emboldening Shakespeare's plays, for example. Yeah, that and also just the fact that, you know, this is something that could not be prevented. And illness is still, despite all of the advances of science, there are still things that, you know, if you have the wrong luck, it can go this way. And just, you know, reading the chapter where they're laying out the body and washing it and trying to prevent the plague from infecting everybody else as they're also trying to pay their last respects to Hamnet.

5:58Like, they have to have all of these considerations in their minds at the same time. and like that felt very modern. Like that felt like that has always been the way that it is. But yeah, you do kind of lose sight of the context when you just read the statistics. Yeah, I think that touching on fate, I think is something I really thought about when I'm reading this. You know, Maggie does this amazing thing where she describes like if he had just been, you know, five minutes earlier or turned this way, he would have seen someone when he was looking for help. And I think about that a lot because it's all about, you know, luck and bad luck and fate and timing.

6:33And the way she describes that just, I think it really pulls you in there. Her writing is just so gorgeous. But it's also beautiful because there's like an intentionality in his death, right? Because he's taking the sickness from his sister and there's like kind of a magical quality to it there where like he's a hero in that way. And I don't know, she gets to make him into this heroic figure by, it's not just that he gets sick and dies, it's that he's making a conscious choice in order to save his twin. And in terms of the other unknowns, You know, there was a lot of, I guess, scholarship from for many, many years that looked at the very few records there are of Agnes Hathaway and Hathaway and saw that she was 26 and pregnant when she got married to an 18 year old William Shakespeare.

7:15And they assumed that she was some bitter older woman who ensnared Shakespeare. And he he lived in London and just, you know, had this annoying attachment back in Stratford. And, you know, and there's been some rethinking of that history. now. There's a book called Shakespeare's Wife that came out a number of years ago that kind of imagined a different history. And now O 'Farrell is doing this in fictional form. And I really appreciate the way that Agnes kind of is brought to the fore, is given a full complicated humanity, a full complicated relationship with her husband. It begins very much as a loving, hot and bothered kind of relationship.

7:49And then obviously changes over time as things happen. And I just really appreciate any kind of historical fiction that, I don't know, it gives body to lives that we sort of only imagine in the faintest of sketches or only know the faintest bit about. And she doesn't do it in a way that I think is maybe overreaching or too, you know, anachronistic or anything like that. It feels very true to the time period while also affording people the full breadth of humanity. Yeah, for sure. It's funny, like in Stratford, Agnes is the celebrity. Like she's the wise woman. She's the medicine woman. She's like who people go to for help.

8:25and Shakespeare's off doing his thing in London. None of them have ever seen his plays. Yeah, I was going to say, we should talk about Agnes just as a protagonist, that there's also intention there in addition to Hamnet previously being a footnote in the Shakespeare's lives. Agnes is not typically the main character of stories about Shakespeare. How does she, in your guys' view, function as the protagonist of the story and kind of reframing such a revered, iconic figure? Have you guys seen Ann Juliet on Broadway? No, it's coming to LA in a couple weeks, I think. It's going to be in LA. So it's a Max Martin jukebox musical.

9:04Right. The songs are all like NSYNC and Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears, but the narrators of the story are Shakespeare and his wife, who in the play goes by Anne Hathaway, mostly so they can make a joke that's like, there'll only ever be one Anne Hathaway. But it's funny. It's also, it's kind of doing a similar reclaiming project in a much less literary way. But yeah, like it's the parallels between the two kind of struck me on looking at the book again. There's a whole like joke about the second best bed in the play as well, which comes up in this. And there's an actual plausible explanation for why Shakespeare may have left his wife the second best bed.

9:44And it might have been a nice thing rather than a diss in his will. Yeah, I think when the Agnes character, and again, it's two different timelines. One when she's older and has kids and the other where she's kind of courting with William and getting married to him. When the younger version of her was first described, I was a little bit worried that it was going to be too much like, well, she's not like the other girls. She talks to the spirits of the forest and all that stuff. And there is a little bit of that but O 'Farrell's writing is so dense and beautiful and kind in a way and that sort of trope, I think she just kind of narrowly avoided it.

10:20I did see some criticism online on Reddit and whatever. I don't know why I was bothering to look there, but like where people were just saying that she was basically like an Elizabethan sort of magical Mary Sue. I don't agree with that. That's not fair. No, it's not fair. That's ungenerous. Yeah, it's just a really interesting kind of rendering of someone we know so little about. And I don't know, I kind of bought it, at least in the world of this story. Yeah, I thought it was great. And there's so much to grab onto with her. You know, there's so many different layers to her. And I really started to love her as the story went on.

10:55And I think she's such an interesting character. The other element of this book that I want to talk about before we shift to some movie speculation is the theme of death. And Rebecca, you mentioned her great memoir, I Am, I Am, I Am, which is entirely about her brushes with death, which range from very extraordinary and strange to very banal and basic and things that we've probably all experienced. It's something she writes about and has written about really uniquely. And so when talking about this book and recommending this book, it is a heavy book. It is a very emotional book. But I think she has a really kind of singular ability to bring something beautiful and hopeful out of it in a way that is, I found the first time I read this and even the most recent time, entirely unexpected.

11:43Yeah, the sequence when Agnes actually sees Hamlet and sees the immortality. Oh my God. Yeah, her son has. That is the book for me. It's just incredible. It's so moving. And she really sells it. I mean, it's not like Agnes is not going to still be grieving her son, but she kind of understands that her husband has channeled his own grief into this incredible work of art that will keep his name or a version of his name, you know, being said. Yeah, it just, it really blew me away. I think anything that gives that kind of new resonance to a kind of sacred old text like that just always works on me.

12:22It's funny, maybe it was subconscious, but I recently rewatched My Beloved Shakespeare in Love, which is such a lovely idea of how Romeo and Juliet and then later Twelfth Night came to be. One of the best endings in movie history, I think. But then in hindsight, it's like, well, that motherfucker. Carrying on in London. When our Agnes is trying to keep things together. And Susanna and Judith, all our friends. Exactly. I don't know that Hamlet needs that extra padding or whatever, but it's certainly welcome because it's really, really persuasive. And for a book that is, you know, let's say slower in pace, it's a lot of detail, but not a ton happens, you know, up until Hamlet's death.

13:03It's just sort of slowly building up to that. And really, in some ways, the whole book hangs on those final moments of her seeing the play, and it delivers. I mean, that's a risky kind of structural choice to make on a writer's part, but it works. Yeah, it's such a knockout ending that it made me so excited for the film because I think if they get that right feeling that like emotion right at the end and that hope, I think what you need sort of after going through this whole journey with them. It's just it's just so gorgeous. Speaking of on film, let's take a quick break. And when we come back, we will discuss the upcoming film adaptation directed by Chloe Zhao.

13:40Stay with us.

13:54Welcome back to Little Goldman from Vanity Fair. So Hamnet the film is set to premiere at the Toronto Film Festival and maybe another festival. Before that, that remains a mystery. The movie is directed by Chloe Zhao. She wrote the screenplay with Maggie O 'Farrell. It stars Jesse Buckley and Paul Meskel in the lead roles. It also has Joe Alwyn, Emily Watson, as Richard noted many months ago on this podcast, another Joop, Jacoby Joop, who's playing Hamnet. I looked to the sky and said, no, there is another. You did, you did. For us all to hear. First of all, I think I'd said way back on that episode just how excited I was about this film.

14:36It seems like the anticipation was justified. The rollout indicates this is a movie that Focus Features is excited about. Yeah, I mean, hearing Jesse Buckley read the story, I was like, God, she's good. And it made me all the more excited to see her in the role. I am concerned about how interior the book is and how it's a lot of stream of consciousness. It's a lot of deep personal thought. I don't quite know how you make that filmic maybe voiceover. I don't know. And Nomadland style, I guess. Yeah, yeah. I think it's going to be pretty impressionistic would be my guess, partly because it's not that plot driven anyway.

15:13But there's a great creative team behind it, which has me, you know, optimistic. Hilary, Rebecca, what are you guys looking out for with this movie? I mean, we were just talking about the ending. I do think that if you stick that, like Rebecca was saying, it's going to be really remarkable to see, but I don't know how quite you can manage that if you're just looking at Jesse Buckley, watch a production of Hamlet, if you can't really understand what she's thinking in the moment. I don't know. She's a great actress, so if anybody could communicate all of that with just her face, then, you know, maybe it's her.

15:45But yeah, I think that that's the part that I will really be kind of waiting for. Yeah, I think if you look at Chloe's pre-Eternals work, you know, I love... I'm sorry. If we ignore the Eternals completely. What movie? What Eternals? Doesn't mean anything to me. I mean, the writer I thought was such a beautifully done film and a lot of that is like a protagonist who is hard to read or you're, you know, doesn't say as much as he probably is thinking. And I think she'll have to do something similar to that. And I feel like she's the right filmmaker to sort of take that on. I do wonder how long they're going to wait for Hamnet's death.

16:24Because as Richard mentioned, there's a lot in the book before that happens. And so much of it is just internal. And how does that work in the film? Well, we get Agnes in Shakespeare's courtship. Yes, that's true. So I'm sure that there will be a lot of that. I think it's going to be a cold open like Scream style. Where they hold Hammett up from Pride Rock. Yeah. I mean, as tricky as it might be to put all of the internal stuff in the book on screen, I think Zhao has an ace up her sleeve in that Max Richter wrote the score. And if anyone knows like sad and elegeic and cinematic, it's him. And I feel like that could go a long way to maybe patching over some stuff that's harder to translate.

17:10I can't wait for some close-ups on some mortars and pestles. We're going to see a lot of grinding of herbs. Not since that Juliette Binoche cooking movie will we have so much lovely period detail. Yeah, Max Richter, one of my favorite scores of his was for The Leftovers, a similar show about the inexplicability of death and loss. I was surprised on my reread how much of a fit Chloe seemed for this material because before when I had the book more as a distant memory, it felt like it would be a real departure for her. It's a period piece. It's dealing in, I think, more concrete plot points than her previous non-Eternals narrative features.

17:54The Eternals was very grounded. Yes, indeed. I can't even make a joke about it because I remember so little about it. But in this movie's case, in the story's case, It's internal in a way where the way she uses the camera feels like a natural fit. It's an understanding of the way people move through the world that is often wordless, often driven by a really naturalistic exploration of the world and the elements. You think about Nomadland and just how spare that screenplay was. So it's obviously kind of an important movie for her because as we've been touching on, Eternals was not the smash success that Marvel hoped it would be.

18:39It was not the sort of, you know, next leveling up for her that some people thought it might be. This is what is expected to be a return to the kind of filmmaking that made her an Oscar-winning filmmaker. Well, and on paper, it's so much more Oscar-y than Nomadland. Yes. Yeah. And when Nomadland was made, I mean, the writer was an extraordinary movie, but it was seen by like 15 people. It was a Gotham Awards, Spirit Awards movie. Nomadland, I think we forget how quickly she skyrocketed off of that movie because even though it was still a Chloe Zhao movie, the amount of eyeballs on it was just, it was so much greater.

19:22How do we feel about the Paul Meskel casting? I mean, he's obviously a great actor. In the more present tense, when, you know, him, it's death time, he is kind of age appropriate, but Paul Meskell is not really going to pass as an 18-year-old, you know, Besot in Shakespeare when they first meet. But I also think there's something sort of, I don't know, more Bartholomew-y about Paul Meskell than there is William Shakespeare-y. I kind of almost think they might have found someone a little readier, a little bit, I don't know, sort of more writerly or something like that. But I mean, I'm sure he'll be great.

19:55But it's just that's not who I had in my head when I was listening to Buckley read the book. And I can totally buy her as Agnes. Well, do you see like a continuity between like sad dad after son Paul Mascow? No, that's true. Yeah, that's very true. He is good at that, definitely. And also in history of sound. Sad Kentucky boy history of sound. Yeah, he's good at sad-eyed stuff. Paul Mascow, hero of Little Gold Men Book Club. That's right. I fell down the rabbit hole looking at, because I noticed that producers on this include Sam Mendes and Steven Spielberg. And I was like, how does that happen?

20:30And I guess Sam Mendes was supposed to direct a version of this with Tom Holland attached a few years ago, which I feel like would have been a different movie altogether. Oh, wow. I guess he stayed on as a producer. But yeah, I assume Holland was going to be the William Shakespeare role. There wasn't a woman attached to play Agnes yet. Zendaya. Yeah. I don't know how true this is. I had heard sort of that once Chloe Zhao started circling it, everything kind of seeded over that direction, you know? And people said, oh, let her go with it. Maybe she just had the better take or whatever. But yeah, I mean, I think the interest from Spielberg and Mendes goes to what you were saying, Hillary, about on paper.

21:09It is a very Oscar-y movie. Maybe a more traditional Oscar movie than we've had in recent years. That's fair. It's like a 90s Oscar movie, like Shakespeare in Love. But if you marry Chloe Zhao's more contemporary style with that, maybe that's the perfect combination. To say nothing of Jessie Buckley as an actor, to your point, Richard, she's so alive. She was, in my opinion, very cruelly snubbed for women talking. I feel like she elevates everything she's in, and she's often in great things to begin with. And we haven't seen her in a while. I was looking at her, you know, resume. She obviously did Cabaret in the West End.

21:40That took up some time. But it's been a few years since we've gotten to see her in a movie, which I'm excited about. This seems like a very good marriage of actor and role. Yeah. She has that earthy kind of quality to her that I think the character has in spades. I want to know who's playing Joan. Oh, yeah. Me and Joan, Agnes' stepmother. That's not listed on IMDb or Wikipedia or anything. Ellen Watson is playing Mary, William's mother, but I think that could be a juicy little role for whoever has it. One other element I would love to talk about is Lucas Joll being the cinematographer. If only because he's a very singular cinematographer, He did The Zone of Interest, which was basically shot like Big Brother with a bunch of hidden cameras in a house.

22:26But he's also done really painterly, beautiful movies like Ida and Cold War. I don't know what he's going to bring to this one, but he always surprises. It also feels like a walk in the park to Best Cinematography nom. I mean, he got nominated for both Ida and Cold War, which I feel like were sort of tougher journeys to get that nomination. So I can't wait to see what he does with this. I also love Joe Alwyn showing up in a supporting role. He's really good at that. He'll work with cool directors. It doesn't matter how big the part is. Maybe they're going to kind of, Bartholomew will be a bigger figure in the movie.

23:00But yeah, maybe that just speaks to the quality of the filmmaking team, that someone of Alwyn's stature is like, no, I'll take a side role. That's fine. I just want to be part of it no matter what. Feels like a good movie to do that for. It was like a good one to be a part of. Yeah, you get that Hetzag ensemble nomination. and you get to confuse people on Instagram I was searching for production photos and someone posted one of Alwyn and Buckley hugging and all the commenters were like they play lovers and it was like guys no that's not that's a brotherly sisterly hug that's not what's happening in this movie it's not that kind of movie no certainly not well we will leave our discussion there and after the break we'll bring in Maggie O 'Farrell to join me and Rebecca to discuss the process of collaborating with Chloe Zhao and bringing Hamnet to the screen stay with us

23:59welcome back to little gold men from vanity fair we've been discussing hamnet on today's book club episode and now rebecca and i are joined by maggie o 'farrell the author of the novel and co-writer of the screenplay maggie thanks for joining us thank you so much for having me we are thrilled to have you here. We're going to talk both about the book and ask some preliminary questions about the movie. You don't have to give away anything, don't worry. But really, we just had a discussion among the hosts about how much we love this book. And I suppose we should start really with your choice of protagonist here.

24:31And I'm curious what compelled you about Agnes Shakespeare as a protagonist and what the challenge was in framing this story around her. It was a book that I'd wanted to write for a really long time and I had circled around it several times and I think I had swerved away from the idea three times and I'd written three other books but in between writing these other books I would acquire more and more books about Shakespeare and his life and biographies and I would read around it and I would make a few notes and I would come back and back to this sort of a few sort of thousand ten thousand words of a manuscript that I have and every time I just think, no, no, I can't.

25:12Who writes a novel about Shakespeare? That's an insane idea. And then I think I finished writing a memoir and I kind of gave myself a talking to. I sort of looked myself in the eye and said, you know, you either have to write this book or you have to just forget about it. You can't keep on, you know, circling around it. And so I looked at what I'd written and I realized that I'd started it in the wrong place. You know, one of the most important decisions you have to make when you're beginning a novel is where the chronological threads, of the novel, you step into it. And I realized I stepped in at the wrong moment.