Hamnet star Jessie Buckley has revealed that she and her young co-star Jacobi Jupe shared a special bond on set and gave each other nicknames to help each other deal with difficult scenes.
Kerry-born actress Buckley plays William Shakespeare’s wife Agnes Hathaway – historically known as Anne – in the acclaimed film opposite Kildare star Paul Mescal as the famed playwright as they struggle to process the death of their 11-year-old son Hamnet.
While the two Irish actors have garnered most of the attention, Jupe also gives a hugely impressive performance as the titular boy, who is said to have been the inspiration for his father’s masterpiece, Hamlet.
Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal in Hamnet
The first half of the movie, which is adapted from Maggie O’Farrell’s novel and directed by Oscar winner Chloé Zhao, portrays the courtship and marriage of Will and Agnes but it takes a very dark turn during a heart-rending scene as Hamnet battles the plague and his mother tries desperately to save him.
Speaking to RTÉ Entertainment, Buckley (36) said, “Me and Jacobi created such a close little bond. I love that little boy, he’s extraordinary. I call him ‘walnut’ and he calls me ‘shell’.
Jacobi Jupe as Hamnet
“For that scene on that day, Chloé asked us to go to a very present and primal place. She created a container where we could feel safe and trust enough that we could go wherever we wanted to go.”
She added, “I had no idea where I was going to go on that day. There was no scream written into the script. I don’t know where grief begins and ends and with the unfathomable idea of losing a child, I really had to take my hands off the wheel and see what came through and luckily I had created such a strong bond with this little boy and we really were a team.
“In between takes, I said to Jacobi if it gets too much you come over to me and say ‘walnut’, I’ll be your shell. Sit down and we’ll take five minutes and then we’ll go again. I guess it’s just the bond, I don’t know how to talk about it, I don’t know what happened. It comes from an unconscious place and it will never happen like that again.
“That’s just the way the grief came out that day with that little boy.”
Buckley won the Best Actress honour at the Critics’ Choice Awards earlier this week for her role in the film, while English actor Jupe, who is the son of former Coronation Street star Katy Cavanagh and filmmaker Chris Jupe, was also nominated for Best Young Performer.
Buckley’s co-star, Mescal (29) was also full of praise for the young actor, with whom he has a beautiful and very believable father-son relationship with in the film.
Jacobi Jupe as Hamnet and Paul Mescal as William Shakespeare in Hamnet
“I did a Q&A with him in London recently and he is such a fascinating human being and he’s also so warm and so wise,” Mescal says. “He doesn’t strike me as an 11-year-old but he’s nothing like an 11-year-old at the same time. It’s fascinating.”
Of course, Hamnet isn’t the first portrayal of Shakespeare on the big or small screen.
Kenneth Branagh, a man who knows his way around a soliloquy or two, played him in Ben Elton’s skittish All is True in 2019 and David Mitchell portrayed him as an exasperated man of letters in Elton’s period sitcom Upstart Crow.
And back in the 1998, Shakespeare in Love, starring Jospeh Fiennes as the struggling young playwright, took historical liberties with our albeit hazy record of his private life and won an extraordinary seven Oscars out of 13 nominations.
This isn’t Mescal’s first brush with Shakespeare either. Back in 2018, he played Demetrius in Rough Magic’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
However, playing Shakespeare himself is a dream role for any actor and while we think we know him, he is still a remote figure from over 400 years ago – a very famous man pieced together from fragments of often unreliable and contradictory history.
“It’s totally that,” Mescal says. “You have the context of the man’s life and his plays but you know very little about what his life was like and that was what I thought was the genius of Maggie’s book.
“She wrote something you could theorise about or speculate about. Something that was very authentic and real and something that was very playable as an actor.
“There was also her curiosity not just about his genius but also his life and the people that he loved. It shifts what you might know about Shakespeare and makes it a very human story and it roots him in reality rather than myth.”
With a Critics’ Choice Award – traditionally seen as a good indicator of how the Oscars will play out – already on Buckley’s mantlepiece, talk has now turned to Academy Awards for her and Mescal.
How ever much they’d like one, they both seem keen to play down the Hamnet Oscar buzz.
“That’s a difficult one,” says the actor who shot to fame following his role in Normal People. “This is an interesting juncture for us with this film. We didn’t make this with any intention of winning awards. and the audience perspective is totally different.
“Everyone likes to compartmentalise films -‘oh, this is something the Academy will love’ or ‘this is something for the independent theatres’ or ‘this is something for fans of blockbusters . . . ‘”
“That reduces it down to something that is very difficult to articulate responsibly..”
However, with its painterly cinematography, actorly performances and the fact that this is a movie about the most beloved fiction writer of all time, Hamnet is exactly the kind of thing the Academy will love.
“We didn’t make it that way,” says Buckley. “We’re just in the river and that is going to take its own course. We’ve done our work. The biggest prize is that people are responding to it in the way they are. We made this for an audience.
“We made it for people to go to the cinemas and actually feel something, whether they are people in the Academy or people in Dublin or people in Paris or New York or wherever they see this, if we can affect one person with this story then our job is done.
“We’re all very proud that we have made a story that can affect people because that is very rare.”
Hamnet is in cinemas on the 8 of January