How Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal found the emotional power of 'Hamnet'

TORONTO, ONT – During the emotionally wrecking final scene of “Hamnet,” Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal had an issue.

“There were moments where the camera was obstructing us,” Buckley recalls. “We were like: ‘No, we have to see each other.’”

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“And then the minute we did see each other, it was like ‘Oh, no,’” Mescal says, laughing. “What a glorious thing.”

In “Hamnet,” Chloé Zhao’s adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s prizewinning 2020 novel, Mescal plays William Shakespeare and Buckley his wife, Agnes. It’s a fictional, speculative drama with basis in historical fact. One of the couple’s three children, Hamnet, died in 1596 at the age of 11. Within a handful of years, “Hamlet” would premiere at the Globe Theatre. The names, scholars have noted, were essentially interc