First Look: Chloé Zhao Explains How Directing ‘Eternals’ Prepared Her for ‘Hamnet’

Chloé Zhao is back. After her Oscar win for “Nomadland” and the Marvel flop of “Eternals,” the filmmaker has returned to more personal cinema. Her new film, “Hamnet,” adapts Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 bestseller about Agnes and William Shakespeare’s love, grief, and the death of their son, Hamnet — a tragedy that may have birthed Hamlet.

We only had one still for this film, that is until today’s Vanity Fair “first look” which gives us a more thorough peek at the film, which is set to world premiere at Telluride next weekend.

In typical Zhao fashion, the film took shape on set rather than on the page. The final scenes were shot in a painstaking 70% replica of Shakespeare’s Globe, where Zhao says, Jessie Buckley, as Agnes, pushed herself to emotional extremes. Paul Mescal plays Shakespeare, more restrained but carrying the weight of the Bard’s distanced personality.

Zhao herself admits she was initially hesitant. She hadn’t read O’Farrell’s novel, didn’t know much about Shakespeare, and had never made a period piece. But meetings with Buckley and Mescal convinced her there was a film here. Reading Hamnet, Zhao decided to take on the project.

Surprisingly, Zhao claims “Hamnet” also owes something to “Eternals.” She admits the Marvel machine gave her “world-building” experience, albeit with unlimited resources. “Hamnet,” by contrast, had one “street corner” to serve as Stratford.

“Eternals had, like, an unlimited amount of money and resources. And here we have one street corner that we can afford, to [stand in for] Stratford…. Eternals didn’t have a lot of limitations, and that is actually quite dangerous. Because we only have that street corner [in Hamnet], suddenly everything has meaning.”

Steven Spielberg and Sam Mendes, who was originally supposed to direct, backed the film. DP Łukasz Żal (“The Zone of Interest”) is described as giving the film its lush textures, while Max Richter provides the musical score.

“Hamnet,” helmed by Focus Features, will screen at Telluride and TIFF before it’s released in US theaters on November 27.