Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley to star in Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet

Paul Mescal will star as the young William Shakespeare in a big-screen version of Maggie O’Farrell’s novel Hamnet, directed by Chloé Zhao.

The film will be scripted by Chiara Atik, adapting Lolita Chakrabarti’s stage play, which has played to sold-out runs in Stratford-upon-Avon and the West End.

Mescal will appear alongside Jessie Buckley as Shakespeare’s wife, Anne Hathaway, called Agnes in the book, which explores the loss of their 11-year-old son to the plague.

Speaking to Vogue to promote his current film, All of Us Strangers, Mescal called the novel “devastating”. “I can’t wait,” he continued. “If I told a younger version of myself that this would be [shooting] this year, I wouldn’t believe it.”

Mescal and Buckley were co-stars in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Lost Daughter, but didn’t share screen time. “I think she’s one of our present-day greats,” said Mescal of Buckley.

Buckley is shortly to be seen opposite The Lost Daughter’s Olivia Colman in Wicked Little Letters; both she and Mescal are recent Olivier award winners – Buckley for Cabaret and Mescal for A Streetcar Named Desire.

Zhao won multiple Oscars in 2021 for her debut film, Nomadland; her Marvel follow-up, Eternals, was less rapturously received.

“Chloé is somebody I can’t wait to get in the weeds with,” said Mescal, “and get into the heads of those characters.”