- Ian McKellen disagrees with several aspects of the film Hamnet, based on the 2020 novel by Maggie O’Farrell, which concerns itself with the life of William Shakespeare.
- “I don’t quite get it,” McKellen told The Times. “I’m not very interested in trying to work out where Shakespeare’s imagination came from, but it certainly didn’t just come from family life.”
- McKellen got his start performing in plays like ‘Richard II’ and ‘King Lear’ with the Royal Shakespeare Company in London.
Ian McKellen can speed through Richard III — no problem. He’s also played King Lear and the Danish prince. But Chloe Zhao’s Hamnet, which imagines the creative origins of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet? Something’s not clicking.
“I don’t quite get it,” the Tony and Laurence Olivier Award-winning actor confessed on Saturday in an interview with The Times. “I’m not very interested in trying to work out where Shakespeare’s imagination came from, but it certainly didn’t just come from family life,” he explained.
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Adapted from the 2020 novel by Maggie O’Farrell, Hamnet dramatizes an important event in the life of William Shakespeare: the death of his son Hamnet at age 11. The book and O’Farrell and Zhao’s screenplay propose that this event inspired the Bard’s creation of one of literature’s greatest tragedies, Hamlet.
O’Farrell didn’t spin the notion out of whole cloth; rather, it descends from a long and fractious scholarly debate that acknowledges the fundamentals — Hamnet’s burial in 1596 and Hamlet‘s first staging four years later — but has never been able to reconcile their relationship to one another.
McKellen owes much of his early career success to performances with the Royal Shakespeare Company out of London’s Royal National Theatre. Now, he adds his authoritative voice to that debate.
“As Hamnet races towards the finishing line, as far as Oscars are concerned, it’s likely to repeat the success of Shakespeare in Love, which had odd views as to how plays get put on,” he said. “But then Shakespeare’s perhaps the most famous person who ever lived, so of course there is some interest in what he looked like, what his relationship with his family was. And we can’t know.”
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Still, there are several aspects of Hamnet that McKellen can’t abide. First, that theater was somehow foreign to Anne Hathaway, Shakespeare’s wife, who was sometimes called Agnes, as she is in Hamnet.
“The idea Anne Hathaway has never seen a play before? It’s improbable, considering what her husband did for a living. And she doesn’t seem to know what a play is! I think there are a few doubts of probability,” McKellen said.
Hamnet stars Jessie Buckley as Agnes and Paul Mescal as Shakespeare, and also features Emily Watson, Joe Alwyn, and Noah Jupe. Buckley, who won the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Drama, is in contention for Best Actress at the Oscars, where the film is also nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, and more.
McKellen returns as the X-Men’s Magneto in Avengers: Doomsday in December, and, in 2027, The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum sees the actor’s wise wizard Gandalf rematerialize.