In Hamnet, grief isn’t a rupture so much as a reorientation – a learning to carry love in a new, altered way. Chloé Zhao’s hushed, elemental adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s novel traces the aftershocks of unimaginable loss through Agnes and Will Shakespeare, as the death of their son Hamnet becomes both a private wound and the quiet genesis of immortal art.
When our Peter Gray spoke with Zhao, Jessie Buckley, and Jacobi Jupe, their conversation drifted beyond craft and into the residue the film leaves behind: how inhabiting such intimate sorrow reshapes your relationship to love, presence, and memory long after the cameras stop rolling. Together, they spoke about what it means to emerge changed – not emptied by grief, but carrying love differently.
One of the ideas that seems to sit at the very core of this film is that love doesn’t end, it changes form. Sometimes painfully, sometimes beautifully. I wanted to ask all of you if Hamnet is about love transforming rather than ending, what is one way each of you now carries love differently because of this film?
Chloé Zhao: Beautiful question.
Jessie Buckley: Oh, that’s a great question.
Chloé Zhao: I’ve learned to let my grip (go), (be a) little less tight and allow and surrender to it a bit more. Still holding on though, but learning that letting go is actually also loving. And that’s hard.
Jessie Buckley: I feel like love is kind of unknowable. It’s so big, and it comes in so many ways that you’d least expect, and it interrupts you daily in your expectation of it. And in a way, it’s a really uncomfortable way to live, but I think a brave way to live is to live with love. And I like it. I like love.
Jacobi Jupe: I think what was really special about the set was that it was safe. We were like a family. I mean, (all start singing Rihanna’s “We Found Love”) “We found love in a hopeless place. We found love in a hopeless place.” (Laughs). The dance takes are a really good example of what brought us together. Something like that made me really happy at the end of the day.
And Jessie, how did you approach Agnes? Was it through research or did it feel more instinctual? How was it collaborating with Chloé to create this nuanced character?
Jessie Buckley: Well, out of fear, yes, I did buy a “How to Be a Tudor” book, and I read about three pages of it before I threw it into the fire. I have no interest in that whatsoever (laughs). But in a really curious way, in a way that I don’t ever want to project an idea of what I think this woman or this character might be until I get to know her from the inside out, I trusted my nose over a few months and gently found the ingredients that I felt were alive and potent as to who she might be in the moment of when I get to set and I use everything. I’m like a magpie. I will collect pictures. I’ll do bits of writing, music, write my dreams down. And at the end of the day, you get to set and you take your hand off the wheel and you look into the incredible faces that are in front of you, and that becomes your story. So it’s never one thing. I don’t have an idea of who this face (is). I don’t have an idea who she is until I’ve lived beside her and in her.
Hamnet is screening in Australian theatres from January 15th, 2026.
