Breaking Baz: ‘Hamnet’s Paul Mescal Talks Love And Artistry, And Chats With Cillian Murphy At A Special Screening

Dave Benett (L-R) Cillian Murphy and Paul Mescal in conversation at a special screening of ‘Hamnet’ in LondonDave Benett EXCLUSIVE : Paul Mescal was backstage in the Picturehouse Central green room where he was awaiting the arrival of fellow Irishman, Oscar-winning Cillian Murphy who was to grill him, in the nicest possible way, about his portrait of William Shakespeare in Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet , a movie that features an Earth-mother performance of shattering proportions by Jessie Buckley as Shakespeare’s wife Agnes. The film is based on Maggie O’Farrell’s bestselling novel that imagines how Agnes and Will meet. Well, it’s definitely animal lust when they meet, I can tell you that. But the heart of the film is how they cope with the loss of their son, the Hamnet of the title, and how they survive the worst of all tragedies: parents losing a child. Out of that pain, it’s suggested, comes great art. And that resulting art from Shakespeare is of course Hamlet - perhaps the world’s most performed drama. I had some time with Mescal away from his Q&A session with Murphy and I asked Mescal whether he’d met bereavement counselors or spoken to people about the death of a child. “I felt slightly uncomfortable with the process of asking someone directly, but I did lots of reading online,” he said. “Just looking at statistics about what happens to a married couple, because I wanted to leave a lot of it up to how I imagined something like that would be.” I don’t think Shakespeare was making plays to show off his talent. I think he was making plays and making work to communicate something about the world. Paul Mescal His voice soft and quiet now, he continued, “Because the one thing that I found is that there’s lots of differences across the spectrum of things that couples and individuals feel in it, but the kind of thing that homogenized it all was the fact that it’s a miracle if any couple really survives the death of a child. There’s many things that are remarkable about both Agnes and Will, but the main thing to me was that they still managed to find a way back to each other. And that’s what kind of breaks my heart. That’s always something that happens in a far away land. And to other people. And unfortunately there’s a percentage of people in the world where it happens to them.” I asked him how he avoided that painful cliché when actors portray famous folk, because his character is Shakespeare before he’s, well, Shakespeare the Bard of Stratford-Upon-Avon. That cliché drives him crazy too, he said. Also, that’s not how the character is presented in the novel so it was never an issue. “So it would have felt surprising to me if suddenly a filmmaker like Chloé was like, ‘Do you know what I want to do? I want to make this about the great William Shakespeare.’ So that was never really a conversation...

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