Hello, I'm Chloé Zhao. I am the director of “Hamnet”. It is then that Agnes, played by Jessie Buckley, arrives at the Globe Theater to see her husband, William Shakespeare, played by Paul Mescal, his play “Hamlet”, inspired by their son, Hamnet, who had died. “Look at me.” And in that moment, he realizes that he wrote this play to process and express his pain over the loss of his son. For Maggie O'Farrell, author of the novel “Hamnet” and who is also my co-writer, when we were working on the script, the entire script was moving towards this very moment. And to create Will's character as the ghost, our costume designer, Malgosia Turzanska, and our hair and makeup artist, Nicole Stafford, mapped out his character arc where Will was wearing blue when we first met him. He uses different shades of blue throughout the movie, but as life takes away the color, it's almost like it's calcified and it becomes colorless and gray and ashy and crunchy, and it's covered in this ashy paint that will eventually, at the end of this scene, finally come off. Then Nicole had the idea to dye Hamlet's hair gold instead of wearing a wig. I thought it was really interesting to use paint, and so did Malgosia hand-painting the linen of all the character costumes. And this idea is consistent with the paint on Will's face, the idea that the veil between what is real and what is not real is just a thin layer of paint away from each other. And the power of letting ourselves be seen is an incredibly vulnerable experience that can allow catharsis to occur, which happens at the end of this scene.
