Looking for something to do this coming weekend? Hamnet, one of 2026’s most anticipated films, opens in cinemas this Friday 30 January 2026.
What can you expect from the film?
1580 England. Impoverished Latin tutor William Shakespeare meets free-spirited Agnes, and the pair, captivated by one another, strike up a torrid affair that leads to marriage and three children. Yet as Will pursues a budding theatre career in faraway London, Agnes anchors the domestic sphere alone. When tragedy strikes, the couple’s once-unshakable bond is tested, but their shared experience sets the stage for the creation of Shakespeare’s timeless masterpiece, Hamlet. From Focus Features and Academy Award® winning filmmaker Chloé Zhao (Nomadland, The Rider) comes a sensitively observed, magnificently crafted tale about the complexities of love and the healing power of art and creativity.
Based on Maggie O’Farrell’s award-winning novel Hamnet and adapted for the screen by Zhao and O’Farrell, the film stars Academy Award®-nominee Jessie Buckley (The Lost Daughter), Academy Award®-nominee Paul Mescal (All of Us Strangers), Academy Award®-nominee Emily Watson (Hilary and Jackie, Breaking the Waves) and Joe Alwyn (The Brutalist).
“Right from the beginning, Jessie was the actress that Chloé had in mind, and now, when you look at Jessie on screen, you can’t imagine anybody else playing that part,” producer Pippa Harris says of the character, who is so deeply rooted in nature and mysticism. “She embodies Agnes. She has a lot of her character within her. She loves the wilderness. She is quite a wild child in the sense that she’s very much at one with nature. She’s slightly mystical. She believes in the soul and the spirits, and she’s a really caring person—I think that that pulses out of her on screen.”
As Will, Mescal had the unenviable challenge of humanizing a literary icon. “For hundreds of years, Shakespeare has become this person we hold up on a pedestal, but he must have had all these complicated urges within him to write from the place that he wrote,” Mescal says. “The thing that I had to do was make this character my own. I had to stick to the history, of course, but the main thing that I focused on was his work. The only thing that we really know is that these are the words he put on paper. That is his lived experience. If you dig into the meaning of certain soliloquies, you find the roots of who he is. That was where I put my attention.”
Hamnet opens in cinemas nationwide on Friday 30 January 2026.
Watch the trailer here:
