Lizo MzimbaEntertainment correspondent
Agata Grzybowska/Focus Features
Jessie Buckley has been tipped for an Oscar for her role in Hamnet
The Oscar-tipped Hamnet, starring Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal, is a film that shows the full range of human emotions, from elation to despair.
It begins with a young William Shakespeare falling in love with Agnes (the other name by which the playwright’s wife, historically referred to as Anne Hathaway, was known), and goes on to explore their immense grief after tragedy strikes their young family.
But while it explores the sad origins of one of Shakespeare’s greatest plays, Hamlet, it never portrays Agnes as just the playwright’s wife – she is at the heart of the film.
“She was the full story of what I understand a woman to be,” Buckley tells BBC News. “And their capacity as women, and as mothers, and as lovers, and as people who have a language unto their own beside gigantic men of literature like Shakespeare.
“It was honestly one of the biggest privileges of my life to live beside and inside this amazing woman, Agnes.”
Hamnet is adapted from the hugely successful book of the same name by Maggie O’Farrell, which was published in 2020.
Agata Grzybowska/Focus Features
Jessie Buckley plays Agnes, Hamnet’s mother and William Shakespeare’s wife
Jessie Buckley’s big break came in 2008 when she took part in the BBC One talent show I’d Do Anything, where she came second in the search to find an actress to play Nancy in a West End adaptation of Oliver Twist.
Since then, she’s received acclaim for a variety of roles. She was Bafta nominated for Wild Rose, where she played an aspiring country singer, and Oscar nominated for playing a troubled mother in The Lost Daughter.
In Buckley’s latest film, the relationship between Agnes and one of her children, Hamnet, is what gives the story much of its power. It’s something that took Jessie Buckley into new emotional territory.
The actress confesses she was “conscious and scared” of whether she could portray the character and story “as honestly and bravely and humanly as possible”.
Her concern partly came from “having not been a mother at the time, and having not lost a child”.
“But,” she adds, “I know love, I know great love. And I think like with anything and with any of the women that I play or in any of the roles and the worlds that I enter I’m just trying to get a little bit more human in what I understand of being alive.”
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The film is directed by Chloé Zhao (left) and also stars Paul Mescal (centre)
Hamnet is directed by Chloé Zhao, who was last on the awards circuit for Nomadland, which won her best director at the Oscars in 2021.
Zhao adapted the book in partnership with O’Farrell, and the film also stars Emily Watson, Joe Alwyn and Jacobi Jupe as Hamnet.
It has received broadly positive reviews from critics, with the Telegraph’s Robbie Collin commenting in a five-star review that the adaptation “couldn’t have been done any better”.
Buckley gives “one of those performances that is for the ages”, wrote Kevin Maher of the Times, also awarding five stars, while The Wrap’s Carla Renata said the actress “is nothing less than magical”.
But Time’s Stephanie Zacharek felt the film’s emotional cues were too obvious, writing: “Zhao doesn’t know how to take a less-is-more approach.”
And Amy Nicholson of the LA Times concluded: “William Shakespeare wouldn’t be wowed by this domestic drama about his home life back in Stratford-upon-Avon. Where’s the action? The wit? The wordplay?”
Agata Grzybowska/Focus Features
The film follows Agnes and William Shakespeare as they fall in love, before tragedy strikes their young family
If Agnes and her relationship with her son is at the emotional heart of the film, its physical heart is located at the Globe Theatre, where the first performance of Hamlet takes place, with Agnes at the front of the crowd pressed up against the stage.
The sequence, which took several days to film, was by far the most challenging scene for Buckley.
“I was not confident at all. I felt terrified,” she laughs. “I felt totally overwhelmed leading up to it and even during it.
“For the first four days, I was completely lost. I felt untethered. I didn’t know where to go, you know, and then I realised that’s incredibly human to be lost, and that is absolutely Agnes’ story to be lost.
“It was such a profound 10 days of being lost. There was a midwife on my right and there was another woman on my left. By day six they were crying, I was crying, I was holding them up.”
She adds: “There was a man behind me who said he hadn’t cried for four years, and he was crying and to feel that openness and bravery of humanity to need the play, need the story and reach out towards it was extraordinary.”
Focus Features
The film explores how Agnes’s son Hamnet (played by Jacobi Jupe) inspires the play Hamlet
There have been many exceptional female performances in recent months which have been tipped for award recognition – Chase Infiniti in One Battle After Another, Renate Reinsve in Sentimental Value, Emma Stone in Bugonia.
But it’s Jessie Buckley’s portrayal of Agnes that is for many the current favourite for best actress at the Oscars in March. Does that bring a sense of excitement for her or a feeling of pressure?
“I can’t quite take what that question is right now,” she replies carefully, before going on to say, with a smile, that if she and the other cast and crew do make it to the big awards ceremonies of 2026, she’ll just see it as a chance to celebrate the story and to enjoy time with a team that became exceptionally close during filming.
“I’m so proud of this film. I’m so excited to share it with the world,” she reflects. “And the greatest gift so far has been feeling the response that audiences have been feeling.
“You make it for an audience. And the rest is out of my, you know, I’m just going to get into the river,” she laughs. “I hope we can all go and have a great office party.”
Hamnet is released in UK cinemas on 9 January.
