We may be in the final stretch of 2025 movie releases, but there’s quite a few great films to seek out, like Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet. The adaptation of the novel of the same name imagines what it was like for William Shakespeare and his wife, Anne Hathaway, to lose their son, Hamnet, and how it influenced the creation of his famed tragedy, Hamlet. During CinemaBlend’s Hamnet interviews, Paul Mescal shared his perspective of the film. While it’s not what I expected him to highlight, it has me seeing the film in an even greater light.
Paul Mescal gives an especially great performance as William Shakespeare when he was first getting his start as a playwright. While talking to our own Hannah Saulic, here’s what he said about his favorite part of the role:
I love love. I love playing love. And I think there’s something, as you said, there’s something so glorious about that first 40 minutes of the film where, I don’t know, they feel like curious children to me, Agnes and Will. They’re just like figuring each other out. And it’s only because of that love that you really kind of get that heartbreak towards the second half of the film.
Mescal went out of his way to bring up the romantic aspect of Hamnet, which is most prominent early in the movie. While I’d imagine Mescal might talk about what went into portraying the iconic figure, or exploring the themes of grief and sadness, and how he translated that through his art, the 29-year-old actor is quick to bring up how much he adores “playing love.” As someone who’s seen it, he’s absolutely right, it’s a love story perhaps more than anything else.
Given Paul Mescal’s career thus far, I guess I shouldn’t be incredibly surprised, from the actor being in Normal People with Daisy Edgar-Jones, to his upcoming role as master of ballads and love songs, Paul McCartney, in the Beatles movies. As he continues:
And I think Chloé [Zhao]’s done an amazing job at balancing those two feelings and also not isolating them from each other. She doesn’t see it as like, ‘Oh, this is where the love ends, and the grief begins.’ If anything, the love increases as the grief arrives in the film, I think.
It’s true the start of the film somewhat plays out like a love story between two young people living in Stratford-upon-Avon in the late 1500s. There’s a sweetness to it that helps the audience get invested into their characters for the more emotional second half of the movie. William and Agnes’ relationship feels a lot smaller and pedestrian than we’d expect after the playwright has been so famous in pop culture, and there’s been loads of William Shakespeare adaptations from Hollywood.
These words from Paul Mescal definitely will have me looking closely at the love between William and Agnes as depicted in the Hamnet movie. There’s certainly a lot of affection between the couple throughout the movie, but it’s also fraught with some more complex emotions from them, such as William dividing his time between his family and his passion to be an artist.
You can see Hamnet in select theaters now, with it coming to more theaters on Friday, December 5.