At about the midway point in Chloé Zhao’s “Hamnet, Agnes (Jessie Buckley), an unconventional and earthy naturalist and healer who’s the wife of William Shakespeare (Paul Mescal), lets out a piercing scream destined to strike the soul of everyone in movie theaters.
Agnes’ primal, all-encompassing reaction to the unfathomable loss of her son was not part of the script and came from an organic place in Oscar-winning Zhao’s profoundly moving adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s beloved novel about how a family tragedy inspired one of the greatest stage works ever, “Hamlet.”
“Hamnet” opens Nov. 26 in the Bay Area and expands to more theaters Dec. 5.
The film calls for Buckley to convey an overwhelming, crippling grief, and in order to go there, the 2022 best actress nominee (for Maggie Gyllenhaal’s “The Lost Daughter”) credits Zhao for fostering a creative space that allowed her the freedom to become one with the part.
“That’s the privilege of our job is to be human,” Buckley said when she and Zhao, who won multiple Oscars for 2020’s “Nomadland,” came to the Mill Valley Film Festival last month, where Buckley received a Spotlight award.
“The thing I’ve learned is my job is to be more human every time I step in to do work. … Chloe as a director and as a leader is very conscious of opening and closing the work … I want to be alive in the moment that is required of me, to be the most human version of what that character and what I am asking myself to go on a journey with. That scream, that scene wasn’t in the script. Nobody knew where grief begins and ends. I would be a terrible actress if I tried to be like, OK, and then I will cry.’”
Buckley credits not only Zhao but everyone involved in the production, including the film crew, who created an emotional bond that allowed the them to feel safe about venturing into intense places, Buckley said, including in that pivotal mother-son scene with Hamnet (12-year-old Jacobi Jupe).
“We were like we’re gonna do this together,” she recalls. “I’ve got your back (and) you’ve got mine. (And) if it’s too hard, you come over here and sit on my lap. I’ll give you a hug.”
The Irish-born Zhao has connected with audiences with her commanding performances, all of which showcase her range of talents. She got started in stage roles but created a head-turning impression in Michael Pearce’s 2017 “Beast,” about a troubled woman in a rural town that’s plagued by a rash of serial killings. Her big breakout came in Tom Harper’s “Rose,” a music-infused drama that collected awards and won her raves for her portrayal of a determined, working-class Glasgow woman seeking to become a country star. In addition to her nominated role playing a distraught mom in “The Lost Daughter,” she appeared in the comedy “Wicked Little Letters” opposite Olivia Colman – who also starred in “The Lost Daughter.”
“Hamnet” presents Buckley with a role that elicits perhaps her most memorable performance. She admits that the film’s cathartic finale set within London’s 16th-century Globe Theatre (or a replica thereof) proved to be especially challenging. They had eight days to shoot it.
“The first four days I was completely lost,” Buckley said. “And I think you (Zhao) were lost too.”
“Lost as hell,” Zhao agrees.
“We’d gone through this whole experience of shooting the absolute voice where we needed to go,” Buckley recalls. “Then you go to the Globe Theatre, which is like the end of the film and also kind of the emotional pinnacle of everything you’ve just experienced. It was the last week of filming and I remember leading up to it going ‘ it’s too big.’ Everything that we’ve lived is too big and now we meet in this space.”
Buckley said she didn’t know where she was going and that helped in the process.
“It was such an important lesson as an actor and as a human that being lost is essential,” she said. “Being lost is rarely something that is seen in stories and film. But for real; I was lost as a character and I was lost as myself.”
“Oh, you’re lost as a character for sure,” Zhao concurs.
“The threads of (Agnes) are so bare,” Buckley elaborates. “She’s just porous and doesn’t know where to navigate herself.”
After the fourth day, Buckley recalls, she drove home that night, put on composer Max Richter’s evocative “This Bitter Earth/On the Nature of Daylight” and then sent the song over to Zhao. (Richter’s score enhances. even informs the film).
“And then something happened for both of us listening to that music where it became about surrendering, which was that next chapter of that journey. All of a sudden this wasn’t about this woman on her own in an unknown space trying to find the thing that she lost.”
Zhao invited a dreamworker to the set and extras gathered and shared their experiences about grief.
“We surrendered to this space, which contains life and humanity and Shakespeare who is the ultimate humanist,” Buckley said.
The communal experience brought so many emotions to the fore. In turn it leads to one of most moving cinematic experiences of 2025.
“There was a man four bits behind me who was sobbing and I went and gave him a hug,” Buckley recalls. “There was a midwife on my right I was holding up. We were all just holding each other and it was because we had gone on this journey together to meet this.”
Zhao keeps the door open for how she will end her films.
“I never knew the endings of my films,” Zhao said. “It’s always found in the process because they look OK on the page but are always too subtle, literally nice to read. My endings of my films are usually very ambiguous. It’s not wrapped up in a bow. It’s a feeling. And that feeling can’t be written. To achieve the ending you have to be very present … . I don’t work linearly but spirally. So with a spiral you don’t know where it’ll end. So four days before there was no ending.”
Zhao related to that feeling of being lost since she had recently gone through a breakup.
Breaking through those hard, challenging parts, of either a role in a film or a part in life, can lead one on a path to something special. That happens in “Hamnet.”
“When I hit those moments I do often think that this is really good,” Buckley said. “Because there’s really something hard to come through that is true. Something very rich and true is going to come through. You just have to make it through it.”