Shakespeare’s Hamlet continues to captivate audiences with its timeless themes and complex characters. This year, several new adaptations are making waves in the film industry.
Hamlet: The Timeless Prince
It’s good to be the king — make that the prince.
One of Shakespeare’s most-adapted plays, there have been over 50 film versions made of Hamlet — from classics like Laurence Olivier’s 1948 version, which won Best Picture and Best Actor, to Franco Zeffirelli’s 1990 film, starring Mel Gibson and Glenn Close, to family-friendly interpretations like Disney’s The Lion King.
New Interpretations of a Classic
This year is no exception, with a trio of films inspired by the famous play making the rounds of the fall festivals, each with its own spin on the classic: Riz Ahmed‘s Hamlet, Oscar Isaac‘s King Hamlet documentary, and Chloé Zhao‘s Hamnet. The convergence of the films at Telluride led to a conversation among four actors who have played Hamlet: Ahmed, Isaac, Ethan Hawke, and Andrew Scott.
“I think what Hamlet deals with, and it’s something that’s so resonant in our culture right now, which is why I think is all these Hamlet stories being told right now, is the idea of the absent father,” explained Ahmed. “Hamlet is a man who doesn’t have a template of manhood he can step into. And so when you’ve got this unmoored sense of manhood, it can be destructive, it can be panicking, it can be frenetic.”
That’s what makes it such a tempting role for actors. “I think there can be a lot of preconceptions around that actors want to do Hamlet because they’re feeling themselves, and yes, it’s the best part ever written,” Ahmed continued. “But it costs you something. Sometimes it costs you things you could never have imagined, and it demands a part of you to show up that any sense of vanity or like, ‘Yo, this is me with the top down.’ That’s not what performing Hamlet is.”
The Challenge of Reinterpretation
The challenge is, then, to make it new for audiences given that it’s been so widely interpreted. “There’s a reason why humanity keeps vibrating off it,” said Hawke. “It keeps being relevant. It’s a problem that it’s so well known, because you want the audience to experience it viscerally. That’s our job, to make it new.”
Scott agreed. “Somebody said a really brilliant thing where Hamlet, the role, is like a jug, and you pour in the actor’s personality, and that jug will take any number of different types of performance,” he said. “I love now that Hamlet‘s being interpreted by lots of people of different genders and ages. Because I really do think it holds it, because it’s so brilliant.”
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Modern Adaptations
“It’s an honor to add to the tradition of people playing Hamlet,” said Ahmed, whose contribution to the canon keeps the name, but moves the action to modern-day London and a wealthy British Indian family. On coming home for his father’s funeral, Ahmed’s Hamlet is — wait for it — yes, upset to learn that his widowed mother is going to marry his uncle Claudius. The cast includes Morfydd Clark as Ophelia and Joe Alwyn as Laertes; the reimagining is directed by Aneil Karia.
Then there’s the documentary version: King Hamlet, directed by Elvira Lind, follows her husband, Oscar Isaac, as he prepared to perform the play at New York’s Public Theater — while dealing with the birth of their first child and the loss of his mother. “This became the public grieving of it,” explained Isaac. “That navigation was strange, and I’m grateful for it, but it was brutal.”
“I thought it was really brave of you and Elvira to share that in a documentary,” said Ahmed. “I was moved to tears, I was laughing my ass off. It was a really look inside the creative process.”
And finally there’s Hamnet, from Oscar-winning writer-director Zhao (Nomadland), based on the best-selling novel by Maggie O’Farrell (who co-wrote the screenplay with Zhao). Zhao’s film imagines the origin story of the famous play, through the love story of William Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) and his wife, Agnes (Jessie Buckley), as they cope with the loss of their son, Hamnet. The film opens with the explanation that the names Hamnet and Hamlet were used interchangeably in the 16th century, and posits that Shakespeare wrote the play as a way to cope with his grief.
“Anything after [Hamlet] is just easier,” said Scott. “That’s why it’s a great privilege to be able to do it.”
