{"id":390057,"date":"2026-01-05T23:52:09","date_gmt":"2026-01-05T23:52:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/390057\/"},"modified":"2026-01-05T23:52:09","modified_gmt":"2026-01-05T23:52:09","slug":"hamnet-ending-explained-by-paul-mescal-and-chloe-zhao","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/390057\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Hamnet’ Ending Explained by Paul Mescal and Chloe Zhao"},"content":{"rendered":"

[Editor\u2019s note: The following interview contains spoilers about the ending of \u201cHamnet<\/a>.\u201d]<\/p>\n

Writer\/director Chlo\u00e9 Zhao drew on ancient storytelling traditions for the ending of \u201cHamnet,\u201d the most emotionally overwhelming scene of the movie awards<\/a> season.<\/p>\n

\u201cCrying together goes back to the Greeks,\u201d Zhao told me. \u201cIn every indigenous tradition, you come around the fire, and then the shaman would channel a story.\u201d<\/p>\n

In fact, Zhao used daily meditations and dream sessions with her actors, and arranged weekly dance rituals to let off steam. \u201cAnimals, dreams, visions,\u201d she said. \u201cPeople have strong emotions. Warriors come back from battle. They don\u2019t just take medication. They can go back home. They sit around the fire, and they dance, and they release these emotions, and that turned into theater, these Greek tragedies. You get together, everyone gets angry together, and then they rage, and then they cry. We have been dealing with this impossible tension to be alive. We so far have not been able to escape the law of nature. We\u2019re going to be born, we\u2019re going to die. And we have been using art and storytelling and a collective communal experience \u2014 to grieve, to feel, to deal with that since way before any of these things that are telling us we should be separated even existed. We\u2019re remembering, ready to survive.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"BARRY<\/a> \"'Dead<\/a> <\/p>\n

At the end of the movie, the grieving Agnes (Jessie Buckley), bereft of her lost child Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe) and her husband (Paul Mescal<\/a>) \u2014 who has long been away writing and mounting \u201cHamlet\u201d \u2014 comes to the Globe Theatre to see the premiere performance. She stands at the edge of the stage with hundreds of theatergoers behind her. She is riveted as the actor playing Prince Hamlet (Noah Jupe) is onstage with her husband, Will, playing the ghost of his father, King Hamlet.<\/p>\n

\"HAMNET,\u2018Hamnet\u2019\u00a9Focus Features\/Courtesy Everett Collection<\/p>\n

And across that stage, the estranged William and Agnes Shakespeare meet each other\u2019s eyes again. \u201cWe stop seeing each other in the world,\u201d said Zhao. \u201cOr even allow ourselves to be seen, because there\u2019s so much shame and guilt. It\u2019s sometimes scarier to be seen, to allow yourself to receive that sameness, than [to try] to see other people.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mescal and Zhao had a disagreement about \u201cwhere their marriage and relationship exists at the end,\u201d he told me at the Soho House in Los Angeles. \u201cBut the way Chloe was describing it, which is totally a true reading, is that there is something shattered and repaired in a certain instance in that look, and for me, I don\u2019t know how I can see Agnes and not feel like it\u2019s a new beginning. Maybe it\u2019s the romantic in me, and maybe it\u2019s where I am in my head and my heart. That was always to me what that moment is. It\u2019s so moving. At that moment, he is connected to Agnes on the wedding day, saying, \u2018Look at me, look at me.\u2019 And Will turns around, and it mirrors that. I felt a feeling of heartbreak and relief: \u2018Thank God, you get to see this. Thank God you understand why I had to go away.’\u201d<\/p>\n

Shooting that sequence marked \u201cfour of the most difficult, but also life-changing days of my life,\u201d said Zhao. \u201cThere\u2019s barely any dialogue. This language is quite universal for everyone, right? Sometimes our truth can only be felt in silence and maybe with Max Richter<\/a>\u2018s music playing in the background. All we\u2019re asking is to see each other and be seen without judgment, unconditionally, and that was healing and also difficult to experience. Shakespeare worked hard his entire life to bring people together every day for a few hours: The illusion of separation dissolves.\u201d<\/p>\n

And that\u2019s what Zhao has experienced at screenings of the film<\/a>, from the premiere at Telluride to Roy Thomson Hall in Toronto to the Academy Museum in Los Angeles. \u201cYou go to these events,\u201d she said. \u201cYou hold each other\u2019s grief and anger and fear and shame in that short amount of time.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"TheThe \u2018Hamnet\u2019 team at the Critics Choice AwardsAnne Thompson<\/p>\n

At the end of the film on the Globe stage, what Zhao wanted to convey was that \u201cit\u2019s so hard for this boy [Hamlet] to let go,\u201d she said. \u201cHe\u2019s in a lot of pain, but he can\u2019t let go because the void is so scary. You don\u2019t know what\u2019s on the other end. He\u2019s between life and death, like where Hamnet is. Hamnet is stuck because his mother won\u2019t let him go. But what Hamlet needed at that moment, which Agnes was able to give to Hamlet, because it\u2019s safer, he\u2019s a symbol of her son, not really her son. She\u2019s reaching out to him to say, \u2018I give you strength to let you go.\u2019 And all the audiences in that moment reach out to him so that this boy, in that moment of fear, can feel the oneness and the fact that separation is an illusion. And when you feel that oneness, then you suddenly feel peace. And the rest is silence. And then he lets go, and therefore allows her to let Hamnet go.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cHamnet\u201d is now in theaters from Focus Features.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"[Editor\u2019s note: The following interview contains spoilers about the ending of \u201cHamnet.\u201d] Writer\/director Chlo\u00e9 Zhao drew on ancient…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":390058,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[10546,75346,88,2695,77739,5450,206,29506,28724],"class_list":{"0":"post-390057","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-awards","9":"tag-chloe-zhao","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-film","12":"tag-hamnet","13":"tag-interviews","14":"tag-movies","15":"tag-oscars","16":"tag-paul-mescal"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/390057","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=390057"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/390057\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/390058"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=390057"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=390057"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=390057"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}