If you watch Aneil Karia’s Hamlet and are, too, stunned by the authenticity of Riz Ahmed ‘s portrayal of a bleary-eyed and tormented protagonist, you should know it wasn’t entirely fake.

“I’d just become a father,” the British actor tells The Hollywood Reporter about the six-week night shoot across London in late 2023. “I was quite sleep-deprived with a newborn baby… it was super intense,” he laughs. “So there’s a kind of fever dream quality to the shoot that I think you also see in the film.”

Ahmed’s grief-stricken performance anchors Karia and scriptwriter Michael Lesslie’s contemporary take on Shakespeare’s Prince of Denmark. The film begins with our protagonist, Ahmed, carrying out his late father’s funeral rites while verses are read from an ancient Hindu text, the Bhagava

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