Northern Irish author Maggie O’Farrell’s entrance into the film world has been an auspicious one.
Hamnet (2025, dir. Chloé Zhao), an Elizabethan period film based on O’Farrell’s 2020 novel of the same name, just won the Golden Globe for Best Drama in an upset victory over Sinners and other blockbuster favorites. O’Farrell can make a real claim to the film’s success: the veteran novelist boasts a co-writer credit and cut her teeth as one of the film’s co-producers—alongside none other than Steven Spielberg (which, to her, still sounds surreal).
Like the book, which received honors from the National Book Critics Circle and the Women’s Prize for Fiction, the film depicts the death of Shakespeare’s only son and the genesis of Hamlet, through which the playwright processed his grief. Hamnet already has Oscar nominations lined up across several production categories, and more are anticipated when the Academy announces nominations on January 22.
PW talked with the author about participating in her own book’s page-to-screen adaptation, hashing out the screenplay with Zhao, and the frenzy of Hollywood awards season.
How did you approach translating your novel for the screen and finding your footing in this new medium?
I had a very experienced guide and co-writer in Chloé [Zhao], which was lucky, because I'd never written a script before. It was really interesting, because Chloé came to the process with a very clear sense of which parts of the book would make the film and which we needed to discard. The first task is thinking about cutting it down—you’ve got a 360-page novel, and you need to get that down to a 90-page screenplay. You know which bits are going to work and which bits aren’t, and so she had a really clear sense of the sort of sculptural shape that the film should take.
This also meant unraveling the chronology. The first half of the book flips back and forth in time between the day that Hamnet and Judith get ill and Will and Agnes meeting. That works on a page—you can ask your reader to make those temporal leaps—but on a on screen, it can feel quite jerky.
Perspective is another one of the key ways the book and film differ. In the novel, you have this omniscient view into the minds of all the characters, but the language of film limits this subjectivity somewhat. How did you reckon with that while you were writing?
What really fascinates me about the film, and I think this is something that Łukasz [Żal, the film’s cinematographer] and Chloé devised together, was that the the role of that omniscient narrator in the novel is taken by a certain camera angle in film. I remember him comparing it to a CCTV angle—like something's up in the corner looking down. It’s very obvious in the scene where Hamnet and Judith switch places, and Hamnet looks up, and you realize that actually the CCTV angle is Death looming over them.
As a screenwriter, your job is not a lone wolf. It's to trust that all these incredible experts in their field are going to put back all the nuance and description that you’ve had to strip out from the novel. Novelists are lone wolves. We write books on our own, and we talk to people, and we read other books, but essentially it’s just us and the characters on the page. When I was writing the first drafts, I was using far too much description, because obviously it’s in my DNA. I would look at Chloé’s and would literally just say “[into house]” and then, bam, into the dialog. But what I learned is that, actually, it was okay for me to write “[into house]” because once you're on set, you realize that it's filled with absolute experts in every different field. I didn't need to describe it, because I had [set decorator] Alice Felton and [production designer] Fiona Crombie doing the most incredible job in fleshing out the house and filling it with these astonishing props and lighting. And Łukasz was doing the cinematography. And, of course, Paul [Mescal] and Jessie [Buckley] were going to put every inflection back into the dialog.
Speaking of them, I thought the casting on this film was excellent. How did you choose Paul for Shakespeare?
The cast is beyond fantastic. Chloé was really clear early on that Agnes would be Jessie. Every day on set, she was throwing her heart and soul and blood and bones into the scene. She was just incredible.
I always wanted it to be Paul Mescal. He has an astonishing capacity as an actor, to represent somebody whose inner world is at odds with their outer world, which I think is perfect for Shakespeare. I actually saw Paul onstage in Dublin when he was probably about 20. I think he was probably still a student, and he was playing Stephen Dedalus in an adaptation of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Even then he stood out a mile. There’s also a really interesting thematic link between the character of Stephen Dedalus and Hamlet—who is actually mentioned in Ulysses, so James Joyce was obviously interested in the idea of Shakespeare and the lost son. It just kind of got into my head that he [Mescal] would be so brilliant for the role.
I think it's interesting to hear you talk about collaborating, because I think sometimes there’s this sense of hostility between a book and the film, at least among the fans of the book. You know, people will say, “The film didn't do this book justice! You need to read the book, it's so much better.”
The film sits alongside the novel, rather than being a replica of it, but that’s exactly as it should be. If you go into it as a novelist expecting it to be the same, of course, you’re going to find the experience disappointing and frustrating, because cinematic language and written language are totally different. The book and the film are fraternal twins—not identical twins.
For me, the big joy of the film is the last 10 minutes. It ends with the first production of Hamlet at the Globe Theater. In a novel, you can’t cut and paste screeds of Shakespeare onto the page. You can't expect your reader to sit through the whole of “To be or not to be.” But making the film, we could completely let the flag of Hamlet fly—you can hear it, you can see the actors, and you can be in the Globe with them. When I was a teenager and I was answering weird questionnaires in magazines, and they asked “If you had a time machine, where would you go?” I would always say I wanted to go to the first production at the Globe Theater. Now I have, and it’s not often that you get a complete wish to come true, is it?
In his Golden Globes speech, Steven Spielberg talked about how he loved your book, and how it immediately made him go to Chloé Zhao for the adaptation. What was that moment like for you standing behind him on the stage? What's your experience been like getting thrown into this world?
I still feel a bit like a civilian. The Golden Globes was really surreal. It’s like a weird dream, because you look around the room and you think, everybody I’ve seen on screen at the cinema or on TV at home—everybody—they’re all in the room. There were a few Zoom calls where I obviously knew Steven Spielberg was on the call, but there’s a really weird part of your mind that thinks, Wow, that guy really sounds like Steven Spielberg. And then you remind yourself that it is Steven Spielberg.
Can you see yourself working on other films?
I’m never going to not write novels because that's my first and main love. But I really enjoyed it. It's a really interesting contrast to the life of a novelist. Going onto a film set is really exciting, especially because novelists are, by nature, incredibly curious people. We are total magpies; we will just look around and steal things, watching people sewing the most meticulous ruffs or putting together lighting rigs. I love watching people at their work, no matter what it is, because it's a way into someone else's life.
As co-producer, I’d be going to bed in the hotel, and then suddenly someone would ring me up and say, “What was the racial breakdown of London?” It's my favorite kind of job to give someone a weird, esoteric Elizabethan fact.
I love the collaborative idea of a film, and it would have to be the right story. You have to feel a connection, as I did with everybody on Hamnet. You have to have the same vision and a really good way of communicating. We talk about the Hamnet film family, and it really does feel like that.
