[00:00:00] ANNE BOGEL: Hey readers, I'm Anne Bogel, and this is What Should I Read Next?. Welcome to the show that's dedicated to answering the question that plagues every reader, what should I read next? We don't get bossy on this show. What we will do here is give you the information you need to choose your next read.
We have a special episode for you today, in which I'm talking with one of my favorite authors, and I won't bury my lead: it's Maggie O'Farrell. When her publicist reached out very recently to ask if I wanted to chat, I gave an immediate yes, which is rare for us. I'll tell you more about what our process more typically looks like shortly, but she is my favorite, and I leapt at that opportunity.
[00:00:57] Here at What Should I Read Next?, we believe reading is personal. Just because I've read every one of her books does not mean you should do the same. Although I hope this episode will think about what you do enjoy, on the page and on the screen, and also why you enjoy it.
Speaking to Maggie O'Farrell today, we're not just talking about one book, one film, one story; what we're talking about is the creative process, and why certain stories resonate, both broadly and individually. We're talking about emotional resonance and joy and sorrow and pain and bringing worlds to life in a way that feels real and true and urgent, and the pleasures of both solitary art and creative collaboration.
I hope you enjoy the exploration. Let's get to it.
[00:01:40] Readers, what we're talking about today is Hamnet, with its creator, Maggie O'Farrell. Her publicist reached out just a couple of weeks ago, on behalf of Maggie and Focus Features, to see if I'd be interested in speaking with her about the film. That film, starring Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal, is an adaptation of her best-selling and prize-winning 2020 novel of the same name. And Maggie co-wrote that screenplay with director Chloé Zhao.
And the publicist asked, was I interested in chatting about it all? Well, if you've been listening to What Should I Read Next? for any length of time, you've probably noticed that we talk to authors occasionally, but not often. And it's not because I don't love talking to authors, I really do, and I'm grateful to have a regular opportunity to do so elsewhere, here locally, and then we host authors almost every month in the Modern Mrs Darcy Book Club. I love a good look behind the scenes, I'm fascinated by the creative process, I am eager to hear how the stories I love to read get written.
[00:02:40] And to be really straightforward about what it's like to create the show, hosting authors on What Should I Read Next? is simple on the production end in a way that most of our episodes are not. But What Should I Read Next? is not and has never been that kind of show that interviews authors about their books week in and week out. Most weeks we talk to regular readers. Can you hear my air quotes? That is a term coined by our listeners to describe our guests whose names you don't recognize because they're not household names or names known in literary circles.
Instead, they're people who feel like and who often are your friend, your neighbor, your grandma, your nephew, your mail carrier, your kid's teacher. Most of our guests have never been on a podcast before and they never will be again. What Should I Read Next? is their first and only time.
[00:03:27] These readers don't work in publishing, they're not looking to get the word out about something they made or something they're selling or something they get paid to do. They are here to talk about their ordinary yet kind of extraordinary reading lives.
Most of our guests are these regular readers who come on the show to talk about the joys and challenges of their highly individual reading lives because when they crack open the door to their own reading experience, it gets you thinking about your own.
When we do host readers with a unique position in the industry like when Sarah came on to talk about her reading life and also to tell us a little bit about her work as a book cover designer for a big five publisher, we'll link that in show notes, we do so because I suspect that conversation will satisfy a point of readerly curiosity, for one, and two, help you understand some aspect of your reading life in a new way.
[00:04:20] And when we do host authors, I do so because I've experienced how my understanding of a book shifts and deepens as a result of these conversations, and I carry those learnings, that experience forward in my reading life. I think I'm a better and closer reader because of these conversations. And when I say that I'm not speaking in terms of making the grade but with real gratitude for my readerly joy and satisfaction.
It is worth saying I really love it when we smoosh these ideas together, like the conversations we occasionally have with authors on What Should I Read Next? in which they come on not with their writing hat on but as a regular reader to talk about the joys and dilemmas of their highly individual reading life. And then they are probably going to ask me to troubleshoot an aspect that isn't working for them right now or help them find the kind of books they suspect they'll enjoy, but like so many of us have happened to us, they've been unable to identify those books on their own. I love those.
[00:05:15] All of that is to say, even though we get multiple pitches for author appearances every day most of our guests come from our What Should I Read Next? submission inbox. Since the show's inception in January 2016, you have been able to find that page and still can today at whatshouldireadnextpodcast.com/guest.
Because most of our guests are regular readers, we do not host a lot of authors. And so when we are considering who to invite on the show in that professional authorly capacity, we spend those author slots very, very carefully. We are incredibly selective about the pitches we accept and the invites we issue. With just 52 Tuesdays in a year there is not room to talk to everybody. Like not even a fraction of all the readers and authors we could talk to.
In the past, there have been times when a publicist's pitch for What Should I Read Next? has landed in my inbox and I knew instantly my answer: it's an enthusiastic yes. This happened when we got a pitch from an author who I didn't think was doing speaking events anymore and then we found out the opportunity was there.
[00:06:23] It happened again when we received a pitch from an author, usually these pitches are actually from the publicist, but we received a pitch for an author doing publicity rounds for a new release who I had previously wanted to host a Modern Mrs Darcy Book Club, and we'd done some inquiring and found out that speaking fee was five figures and we could not afford that fee for a special appearance. But now here they were doing publicity. Did we want to talk? Yes. Yes, we did.
And then when I just got the pitch from Maggie O'Farrell's people — have I said enough times that she is my favorite — instant yes and an easy yes because, as Will joked, I have been preparing for this interview my whole life, or at least since 2017 when I read her novel This Must Be the Place, my first Maggie O'Farrell novel, and became an instant devoted fan.
[00:07:13] Between then and now, I decided along the way that it was essential that I read every one of her books. I've read some of them multiple times, as I think you're gonna hear. In fact, I had just finished her forthcoming novel Land, due out this June, just days before her publicist reached out, and Will and I had just seen Hamnet in the theater over holiday break.
In another way, the timing was almost uncanny, little did the publicist know when she reached out. But since last summer, we've been cooking up what we've been internally calling our completest author series on the Modern Mrs Darcy blog.
I imagined myself and my team writing a series of posts on this topic with completest meaning: for which authors have you read their entire body of work, can you choose one and tell us what is it about this author? What keeps drawing you back to their work, and which books would you specifically like to draw new readers' attention to?
[00:08:09] And sure, you can be a fan of a newish author who's only written two or three, but this completest series would feature authors who have written at least six books. My intention has long been to kick off the series myself and then after my initial post our team members could take turns writing about the authors for whom they are completest.
I have quite a few authors I could choose from because I've read their whole catalog, but the one I'd planned to begin this series with was, you guessed it, Maggie O'Farrell. In fact, at the time the publicist reached out we were just days away from running that post on Modern Mrs. Darcy but we held it so as to release it in sync with this episode. That post just went up yesterday. You can check it out at modernmrsdarcy.com. We'll also put a direct link in show notes. Please go read that post as it's a companion to today's conversation. In that post I'll focus more specifically on a half dozen or so of her works.
[00:09:00] But right now, before we hear from Maggie herself, I'd like to share the path that led me to being a completest and a devoted fan of her work. I do not remember why I first picked up This Must Be the Place. I wish. I wish I knew. I wish I had a record. But here's what I do know. It was published in July 2016 here in the U.S., but I didn't begin to read it until over a year later in October of 2017.
I remember this because I took it on a trip with me to Davidson, North Carolina, where I was doing an event with the wonderful bookstore there, Main Street Books. And you know, I bet some of you listening right now were there that very night.
Well, after that event I remember that I could not get to sleep in my room at the inn, like not at all. I was traveling with my friend and assistant and we were sharing this huge room at the Davidson Inn, and I remember being so afraid that I was going to wake her up. I'd been up for so long.
[00:09:55] So I grabbed a blanket and went into the bathroom and tried to make myself comfortable on the cold tile floor and settled in to finish my book. I don't believe this was a couple chapters to go kind of situation. I'm pretty sure I was up reading for hours. And I remember the next morning I was tired because I didn't get as much sleep as I wanted to, but I wasn't all that sad about it because I had enjoyed the book so much.
My reading taste has evolved in the past 10 years as we just discussed in our January 2026 Ask Anne Anything episode. We're going back almost that far with this story. But one thing that has only deepened since that time is my love of realistic literary or literary-leaning emotionally resonant novels. I especially love a tone that's wistful, reflective, or wise. I know my favorites quietly, and I say quietly because I distrust a heavy hand, they quietly invite the reader to look at how life is or how life could be. Like, what does it feel like to be in that space? These novels make me think, yes, this is real, this is true, this is how it is.
[00:11:01] Different things evoke that sense of emotional resonance in different readers. These connections are often deeply personal and may come down to specificity of circumstance and timing. For you, the thing that really pokes that sense of emotional resonance could be love or work or faith or a certain sort of loss. For me, the stories with the most emotional resonance often come in the form of a novel about a family in a tricky situation.
It just so happens that Maggie O'Farrell's go-to is about families in tricky situations or often women in tricky family situations. I just mentioned the specificity of circumstance and timing, and you know I did not realize it until tracing back my Maggie O'Farrell history to tell you this story today. But I wonder how much one of those strange and sad synchronicities accounts for my deep love of her work.
I finished the book that late, late night in October, and while I thought it was incredible, there was one specific scene that nagged at me. It didn't feel realistic. And while I am willing to suspend my disbelief to some extent even in a realistic novel, I wondered if Maggie was asking too much of me as a reader to believe that scene belonged in this story.
[00:12:14] But then just a few weeks after I finished the book an all too similar scene unfolded here in my town for a friend of mine, and in the aftermath, my mind kept coming back to This Must Be the Place. And that scene I didn't believe could be real. I can see in hindsight now how that experience shifted my relationship with this book and with Maggie O'Farrell the author as well. I think it moved me to a place of greater respect and greater trust.
I know I'm being a wee bit cryptic because I don't want to give any spoilers but if you're interested, I did write a piece about this on my blog, Modern Mrs. Darcy forever ago now. It's called "Say what you mean to say." You can just google that plus Modern Mrs Darcy. We'll also put a link in the show notes.
After that experience with This Must Be the Place, well I read that book again. I felt like I had to. I read it almost immediately. And I can see in my blog history that I went on to name it as a favorite read and reread of the year in 2017 and then a reread in 2018, 2019, and again in 2021.
[00:13:16] But long before I'd racked up all those readings and more of This Must Be the Place, I started getting familiar with her back catalog. Instructions for a Heatwave was my backlist starting point. Then I read her memoir I Am, I Am, I Am when it was published in 2018. And then Hamnet pre-release in the early days of the pandemic.
It was a summer release that year, but 2020 Anne deemed it too sad for the Summer Reading Guide. I don't think 2025 Anne, for example, would have made that same decision but that's what it was back then. Instead, I incorporated it into our Fall Book Preview that year, calling it a summer release that was pitch perfect for fall reading.
Here's what I said. "In her sweeping novel, Maggie O'Farrell takes a few historically known facts about Shakespeare’s wife and family and, from this spare skeleton, builds out a lush, vivid world. You should know this book is devastating, and I consumed the better part of a box of Kleenex while reading it. Yet with its captivating central character and evocative storytelling, I didn't want to leave Shakespeare's world—or put down O'Farrell's writing. The story centers on Agnes, Shakespeare's wife, who is torn apart by grief when their son Hamnet dies at age 11. Soon after, Shakespeare writes Hamlet—and O'Farrell convincingly posits that the two events are closely tied. In her distinctive style, O’Farrell takes you to the heart of what really matters in life, making you feel such a deep sense of loss for Hamnet that you won’t look at your own life the same way."
[00:14:48] Well, in 2021, I decided it was time to become a true completest. I ordered copies of her remaining works, got my highlighters and book darts and a special journal ready, and embarked on my quiet and personal nerdy little project. And it was such a joy.
While O'Farrell's style has evolved over time, the constants are stylish but not overwrought prose, interconnected and layered stories, intricate plotting and evocative detail. Her work feels lush and richly textured in a way that this reader finds incredibly satisfying. And don't you worry, I say a little more about each of those individual works in my completest post on Modern Mrs Darcy that just went up yesterday.
I could happily talk to Maggie for hours about her entire body of work but at this moment she was specifically doing publicity for the Hamnet film so that's what you'll hear us mostly talk about today. At the time we spoke the Oscar nominations had just been announced with Hamnet pulling in eight including for best adapted screenplay with O'Farrell as a co-writer, best film, and best director.
[00:15:57] Today we're discussing the inspiration behind Hamnet, how a seasoned novelist learned to distill her 300 something page novel into a 90-page screenplay, the joys and challenges of moving into a visual medium, unexpected audience reactions to the film plus what to wear to the Oscars. I hope you enjoy the conversation. Here's Maggie O'Farrell.
Thank you so much for making the time today. Your work has meant a lot to me and this is a real treat to speak with you today.
MAGGIE O'FARRELL: Thank you. It's very nice to meet you.
ANNE: And congratulations on your new Oscar nomination for best overall screenplay with director Chloé Zhao and for Hamnet. I believe it was eight nominations overall.
MAGGIE: That's right. I know. It's very exciting. It's not something... very surreal, it's not something I ever thought would happen to me. But I'm just enjoying the ride. It's a bit of a wild ride.
ANNE: I hope you enjoy deciding what to wear to the ceremony.
MAGGIE: There's a lot of discussion about that among me and my friends and my teenage daughters. There's a lot of photographs coming back and forth. I keep pulling the leg of my teenage daughters telling them I'm going to wear Björk's swan dress or Lady Gaga's meat dress. You know, you never know.
ANNE: Anything that makes an adult's work fun to discuss with teenagers, I feel like you're doing something right.
[00:17:10] MAGGIE: Yeah, exactly, exactly.
ANNE: Maggie, your body of work is primarily novels. Did you ever imagine screenwriting was in the cards?
MAGGIE: Not really. I hadn't really ruled it out. It just wasn't something that had presented itself to me. But when I heard that Chloé Zhao was interested in making an adaptation of Hamnet, I was really pleased because I knew that from Chloé's work, you know, I'd seen all her films, that she was never going to make it into a kind of conventional costume drama, which I never wanted any adaptation of Hamnet to be.
But I was initially hesitant about co-writing a screenplay just because I'd never done it before and also I'd kind of moved on to other projects and I thought, "You know, I don't really..." But Chloé's very persuasive and very impassioned and she wasn't at all what I expected on the first ever Zoom call I had with her. I was expecting a very sort of... I don't know, when you have a Zoom call with an Oscar-winning film director you... I was expecting a kind of, I don't know, a Beverly Hills Mansion in the background, a butler, you know, gold door handles. But not at all. Chloé was kind of... she had salty wet hair because she'd been surfing and she was wearing a hoodie and there were just lots of dogs in the background.
[00:18:17] So I thought, "Actually, maybe this is my kind of person. Maybe I could work with her." So I'm really glad I changed my mind and said yes.
ANNE: Aside from the salty surfing hair, what about her vision for Hamnet persuaded you to join her on this project? It's fascinating to hear how talented creators decide which projects they care about enough to devote entire years of their lives to. What did Chloé say and how did you know this film was such a project for you?
MAGGIE: What she said in the first ever meeting we had was that she wanted to make the film about Agnes. Because I was always wary, I think, when I was talking about the screen adaptation was that the kind of magnetic pull of wanting to make it more about Shakespeare to make... obviously, put him front and center.
Obviously, I love Shakespeare and I love other films and stories about him. I really wanted this to retain its sense of focusing on his family, you know, his wife and his children. So I was wary about other film directors who would have said, "Yeah, I want to make this film but actually I'm going to completely change it. It's going to be a narrative about him." But Chloé said instantly, "It's got to be about Agnes. It's her story. It'll be her emotional landscape. So I was very taken with that.
[00:19:32] Chloé also brandished…. she held up a brandished copy of the novel and said, "I want to make this. I want to make this." So I thought, "Oh, okay, why not?" I mean I think my thinking was I'll just... partly also I think you should challenge yourself to do new things, you know? Always through life you should always try and put yourself out of your comfort zone and think, Well, yeah, I love... I mean I love writing novels and I always will, but at the same time why not give this a whirl? You know, it would be interesting.
Also, the idea of collaborating is quite interesting. As a novelist, novelists are very much lone wolves, you know? We live quite solitary lives. I mean obviously apart from my friends and family. And I like that, don't get me wrong. But I thought, "Actually maybe it would be really interesting to collaborate with lots of different people on this project."
ANNE: Yes, you are anticipating what I'm so curious about. I imagine that writing novels is a solitary endeavor at times, but your creative collaboration, and I'm just gleaning this from, like, you did a delightful conversation with the New York Times. I'm not part of that WhatsApp thread. But your collab seems to have an entirely different energy. Would you reflect on the contrast and what that felt like for you creatively?
[00:20:40] MAGGIE: I think Chloé and I are very different in a lot of ways, you know? We're different ages, different backgrounds, and I think our skills are very different but really compatible in a way. There was always a point at which... I mean Chloé came... obviously, I mean, it goes without saying that Chloé's got an awful lot of experience about putting together a narrative for the screen. It doesn't really need to be said. But she came to the project initially with a very clear idea of what she... I think, in a sense, how she wanted to disassemble the novel and reassemble it for the screen. Because there's an awful lot of ground you have to cover really, because I mean the book is I don't know, whatever 360 pages.
[00:21:19] And obviously one of the first tasks is you've got to strip it right back, strip it down, because the screenplay is 90 pages or so. So that's one of the things. She had a very strong sense of which strands of the book she wanted to retain and which we had to lose in order to make a film out of it, which was very useful to me because obviously my sense of the narrative was how I wrote it as a novel. So I think that was a huge help to me when we were writing the first draft.
In a way, I think I was able to say, "Yes, but if we remove this thread several beats down the narrative, this character's motivation is no longer clear." So it was a question I think at that point of cutting back and also rebalancing the narrative so it all made sense to the new version.
ANNE: What's had to remain from your joint point of view?
[00:22:14] MAGGIE: Well, obviously, the idea that Hamnet dying halfway through was retained. The structure. Because obviously, the first half of the novel is not particularly chronological. It goes back and forth in time between the day that Hamnet and Judith get ill and Agnes and Will meeting for the first time.
I think you can ask a reader on the page to make those jumps with you, those temporal jumps, but on the screen any kind of flashback, it can be quite jarring. So I think we both agreed that we needed to unravel that chronology and make it chronological.
But, I mean, essentially, I think the film, apart from that one sort of the flashbacks in the first half of the film, the structure of the film in terms of its temporal arrangement is the same. Hamnet dying. This isn't a spoiler, Hamnet dies halfway through, and then the second half is about how the family recover, how the family deal with his loss. And it covers, and in a sense, either the structure...
[00:23:16] I think the beating heart and the structure of the book is exactly there in the film, but they are slightly different. I think of the film as a non-identical twin to the book, which is exactly as it should be.
ANNE: Ooh, I'm so glad you mentioned that. We are accustomed to seeing our favorite novels used as IP for films and they're not interchangeable. It's not, you experience the story in one medium or the other. Would you say more about how you think about them as companion pieces? Like, what is their relationship with each other?
MAGGIE: I think as the novelist you have to go into the project knowing and embracing the idea that it is going to be different. And it should be. You couldn't and shouldn't make a film that's a replica of a book because the book already exists. And you can't do it because a person sitting in an armchair reading a book is interacting with the narrative on the page in a completely different way than an audience in a cinema watching something on screen.
[00:24:11] So I think it's all right and good that any film version will sit alongside the book. And also, going back to a kind of familial metaphor, the book is my baby, and it always will be. I made it exactly as I wanted it to be and every word I kind of carefully edited and re-edited. It's exactly the way I personally wanted it. But the film is... I mean, it's Chloé's vision of that story. And that's absolutely right because it's her film. She's the director.
I learned a huge amount, I think, about narrative for the screen. And I think the first lesson I learned was economy, in that, you know, my natural instinct as a novelist when I was writing a scene was to write, you know, interior a house and then I would want to say, the house is on a busy main street, it has this, it has that, the people inside are wearing this and they're feeling this, because that's the way I'm kind of trained.
[00:25:08] But I would look at the version that Chloé had written of the same scene and she'd just write, "Interior House," straight into the dialogue. And I think, "Okay, all that descriptive, all those lovely adjectives that I've chosen carefully, I need to save all that for my novels." Because actually what I learned when I was on the set and I saw this, because screenplays do look very kind of bare in a sense, especially to somebody who, like me, is used to working in fiction.
But then when you go on set, this very, very alchemical and magical thing happens where you realize that actually... So I think I learned economy in that way, but I also learned a huge amount of trust. Because you realize that on set you have to trust all your collaborators with all that nuance and detail that you've had to take out of the book. So you rely on the person who's done the set design, you rely on the cinematographer, the lighting people, the costume people, the actors of course who can put all the emotion and nuance back into those words and inflections and expressions.
[00:26:05] I remember the first day on set I was wearing headphones and I kind of thought, "Ah, okay, I see it. I see it. All that stuff that you have in a novel which we took out for the screenplay has all been put back in, and in this new form."
ANNE: Oh, I'm glad you mentioned that element of trust because it sounds exciting and wonderful and also a little nerve-wracking to be learning on the job with your baby, this novel that you created.
MAGGIE: I think it's always good for us to be learning new things. I mean I'm, whatever, I am 53, 54, and how brilliant that I've been able to learn this new element towards life and a new way of thinking in a new way of writing. That's irreplaceable, really. I think that's what keeps us all ticking over, doesn't it? Learning new things.
[00:26:50] ANNE: I hope so. Your writing is so gorgeously lush and it has all those textural elements and details where you can picture the house exactly because you give as many paragraphs in order to do so. Hamnet the film felt right to me because from the opening scene in this visual medium, the imagery was so gorgeous and powerful and evocative. Would you speak to working in this visual medium?
MAGGIE: Yes. Well, I can't take any credit at all for how beautiful the film looks. That is all down to the big Hamnet film family. But I think it was very... you know, I look at the interiors that were put together by Fiona Crombie and Alice Felton, and I see Margot's costumes and the lighting and Łukasz Żal's cinematography and Chloé's direction, and I can see that there is a strong sort of strand of DNA and all that way from the book to the film. And they've taken it all and run with it and done their own idiosyncratic version of it, but I mean it's so beautiful. Every shot, especially the interiors, just look like a master's painting, you know? It's just perfect. And you can almost smell, you can smell the 16th century, can't you, when you see those interiors?
[00:28:03] ANNE: It's gorgeous. Would you say more about being on set, about the experience of watching your novel come to life? That does, again, sound like such a contrast to... I don't know where you sit when you typically write, but I imagine it's not with a Tudor house in your field of vision.
MAGGIE: I wish. No. At the moment I'm sitting in my son's bedroom. My son's away at university, and his room has got really good connectivity so I often come in here. I've got a kind of studio in the garden so I write down there. And it was an old greenhouse which fell down quite recently in a storm, so I had it rebuilt. So it's all good, yeah, it's fine. But I rebuilt it. I say I rebuilt it but someone rebuilt it for me. Don't get me wrong, I wasn't out there with concrete on my hands.
[00:28:52] But no, but being on a film set was... I mean it's really strange. It was as if my kind of brain was split in two. Because half of me was... As I said, a novelist's life is quite solitary and you spend a lot of time at home talking to your imaginary friends. Being on film set for me was incredibly interesting. And as a novelist I'm always really interested to hear people talk about their jobs and what they do, no matter what it is. It's fascinating.
And so I would look around and I think, oh my goodness, there's somebody putting together a lighting rig and there's somebody sewing an Elizabethan ruff and here's somebody else who's dyeing cloth to make it look as though it's been worn in. You know, there's the animal handler holding a hawk on his arm. And it was just so, so interesting, all of it.
[00:29:34] And then I'd be sitting in the tent and I'd have the headphones on and I'd be watching a take, and somebody would say something and I'd think, "Oh yeah, I wrote it." Because part of me would kind of forget that actually this was Hamnet, a film of a novel I wrote. And then something would remind me and I'd think, "Oh wow, this is incredible. I'm never going to forget this."
ANNE: What was that experience like of literally watching your work being created day by day?
MAGGIE: It's very surreal and not something you ever think is going to happen to you. I mean, part of me was actually anxious in a way because I was worried that seeing the actors dressed up and in the sets that their image that they were creating of the book or the story would replace the images that I had while I was writing the novel. And I was really worried because I mean, I really love, I'm so attached to that imagery as part of the book and part of the experience of writing it and being submerged in the narrative on my own at that point. And they're so precious to me. But actually it hasn't.
[00:30:38] As I was saying before, the two sit alongside each other. So although I have in my head all the beautiful imagery of Paul and Jessie as Will and Agnes, I still have in a kind of different compartment the images that I had of the people when I was writing it. So I'm glad that I'm able to retain both.
ANNE: You know, I'm realizing as you're talking about the glovers and the bird handlers that you must have done an incredible amount of research for writing the novel. I'm curious if that was utilized in creating the sets and in imagining how Agnes' world would be portrayed in Hamnet the film.
MAGGIE: I did have lots of Zoom chats with Malgosia, the costume designer, and Alice and Fiona, the set designers. I mean, obviously they had the most incredible ideas of their own. They are geniuses. My God, the three of them, amazing. When I went to the production offices and I saw all over their office wall were just hundreds and hundreds of visual references, which I loved, I spent hours looking at them all and talking about it.
[00:31:42] So we did have a chat, definitely. But they completely ran with it and created their own 16th century. But it was all so beautifully thought out and beautifully put together. One of my favorite things that Margot did, the costume designer, was she... I can't remember whether we talked about this. We might have talked about it on the Zoom chat. I was talking about how ink used to be made in the 16th century, which is made from oak apples, which are a kind of strange thing that grow on apple trees when a wasp has gone inside the bark.
So to make ink in Shakespeare's day, you would take these oak apples, you'd grind them up, and you'd soak them in a ferrous compound. It's very complicated. Anyway, so I was talking about that. And then Malgosia dyed William Shakespeare's costume with the same compound. So, Paul Mescal, when you see him on screen, he's literally wearing ink. And I love that. It's one of my favorite details from the whole film.
[00:32:39] And Alice and Fiona, when they were making the interior of the Henley Street house, you can't really see... I don't know whether you can see on screen, but a lot of the bowls and crockery and items in the house have been broken and put back together. And there's often marks on the walls. They showed me all this when I was going around to kind of speak of the violence that's happened in that house.
ANNE: Ooh, the things I will certainly look for on my next viewing. You've mentioned the casting several times. Since you did, in fact, have to have the images in your head replaced by these corporeal people, talk to me about Paul and Jessie. And I know you've spoken affectionately about other members of the cast as well. Why them? And how did it feel?
[00:33:24] MAGGIE: The cast is just a dream cast, actually. They're all so, so incredible. Chloé said right from the start that she wanted it to be Jessie Buckley as Agnes. I think it was a stroke of genius because Jessie's so perfect for that role. It's hard to know really where Agnes ends and Jessie begins and vice versa. She poured herself absolute heart and soul, blood and bone into that role every single day, every single take. She's just perfect.
I always wanted Shakespeare to be Paul Mescal. Even before Chloé was involved, I was kind of Team Mescal. Whenever it came up, I'd say, "Paul Mescal. Paul Mescal." I saw him on stage, I think he was either a student or just very newly graduated, on stage as Stephen Dedalus in an adaptation of Portrait of the Artist in Dublin at the Gate Theatre. This was years ago. He obviously stood out a mile in the cast.
[00:34:23] There's quite an interesting thematic link between Stephen Dedalus and Hamlet. Hamlet's actually mentioned in Ulysses. So, Joyce was obviously interested in that connection as well, the father and son. So it just always got stuck in my head. So I was really thrilled when he accepted the role.
I mean, the cast is just... you know, the kids, Jacobi's incredible. Emily Watson is just luminous. She lights up the screen. I think we were incredibly lucky with the casting. And Nina Gold, casting director, did an incredible job of finding these people and saying, "How about this one?" And she was always right.
ANNE: Well, I believed in the characters from the opening beats and thought it was incredible how your interior monologue of Agnes, she knows things. She has a strong spiritual element to her. And I thought, "How in the world are they going to show that on the screen?" And then they did.
[00:35:15] MAGGIE: One of the things obviously that makes Chloé a brilliant director is that she has an amazing capacity to express a character's internal landscape in the external landscape. You know, you see it in The Rider, you see it in Nomadland, and you see it here. It's a really beautiful effect with Jessie in the forest.
And Paul, I think, at the beginning anyway, in the glove workshop, that seems to be a reflection of his state of being at that time. Everything is being cut up, everything is stitched, everything is tight and violent, actually. Then later on, you see him by the river, by the Thames, and I feel that's his... I mean, Chloé is brilliant, I think, at placing somebody in these surroundings, which reflect their inner landscape.
ANNE: Those are such lovely visual representations. I'd love to hear you reflect on the heart of the story. This is a film about love and pain and great loss, which has made many readers and viewers anxious as they enter into the story. They fear it will be bleak. But Hamnet is not that, not the book or the film. What they actually find there is something else, and I'd love to hear you reflect on that something else.
[00:36:22] MAGGIE: Well, I never ever wanted to write... When I was beginning to write the novel, I never wanted it to be two things. First of all, to be exclusive in a way that I didn't want anyone to have to have read Shakespeare or to have a degree in literature or anything like that, even to have read Shakespeare ever, to read and be able to relate to the story. It was really important to me that it was relatable to everybody.
And also, I never wanted it to be bleak. Obviously, I know the story centers on the death of an 11-year-old child, which, of course, is heartbreaking. But I wanted people to understand, I think, the way that I feel there's an indelible connection between the loss of Shakespeare's son and the making of Hamlet and actually, how Shakespeare explored and celebrated his life by writing this play and how we know his name even now. Hundreds and hundreds of years later, we know about him because the play has got his name.
[00:37:23] And I never ever wanted to end the book or the film with Hamnet's death. I think that's too much. It's too awful for a reader. Because to me, one of the most interesting parts of the story is what happens after that. Shakespeare writes Hamlet. The film and the book always had to end with the production of Hamlet.
ANNE: We thank you for that. Of course, the story being what it is, you must have known in some ways what viewers and readers would find in this story, how they would feel, what they would take away. But what has surprised you? I'm curious about what steps this story held, or maybe nuances, that you did not consciously realize were there.
MAGGIE: To be honest, I don't think you ever know, as a novelist or a screenwriter, what people are going to find in your book. And sometimes people say things to me that they saw in a book, and I think, "Wow, I never knew that was there," or "I never saw it was there." So I don't think you know. All you can do as the writer is to create the story, write it the way you feel it should be written, and then you just have to let it go out into the world. And you don't really know how people are going to react.
[00:38:31] Several people have told me that they've been in screenings... there's a point in the film... in the book, the name Shakespeare never appears, and then Will doesn't appear, William, none of that. He's never named. Because in a way I felt his name is so enormous. It's such an iconic name that I had to just take it out because it was too distracting.
In the film, he is called Will, I think. And then about 10 minutes from the end, Joe Alwyn says, as Bartholomew and his brother, he says, "We're here to see William Shakespeare." And several people have told me in the screenings that people in the audience go, "Oh! I was not prepared for people not to realize until that point." But I love that. I think that's fascinating that they've been watching almost an hour and a half and not quite twigged that it's about Shakespeare. But that's great. So that's really surprised me. But yeah, I think anyone's interpretation is great.
[00:39:37] ANNE: What a compliment that the film is emotionally hospitable all the same.
MAGGIE: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. It's interesting what people take from it.
ANNE: Maggie, you've spoken of the joys of new challenges and how you're continuing to learn and evolve as a creator. How did this creative process change you and perhaps your work going forward?
MAGGIE: That's an interesting question. I don't know yet. I think it's too early to tell. I mean, it's been fascinating. I feel like I've learned a lot. I was writing a novel in between time... you know, because writing a screenplay isn't something you do from start to finish. There's sort of a lot of stop-starts, and there was a writer's strike and all those things. So in between the time I was writing a novel as well.
But I think it's one of those things you really don't know. I think all experiences change you, but I don't know... I'm sure it will filter into my work, all the things I've learned throughout this process, but I don't know how yet. That's one of the interesting things about being a writer. You don't know. You know something will come out, but it often comes out sideways. So we'll find out, I guess.
[00:40:32] ANNE: Was it your forthcoming novel, Land, that you were working on? As I was reading, I kept getting the sense that, "Oh, Agnes would really enjoy this story."
MAGGIE: That's a funny thought. Maybe she would.
ANNE: I was being absolutely serious.
MAGGIE: Strange cross-pollination.
ANNE: I hope so. Well, this has been a pleasure. Thank you so much for your time. I'm so excited for readers to continue to visit your work and this film. We wish you all the best, and I'm excited for what you do next.
MAGGIE: Me too. All right. Thank you, Anne.
[00:41:10] ANNE: Hey, readers. I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Maggie O'Farrell today. Visit our show notes at whatshouldireadnextpodcast.com for more information on the Hamnet film, my Maggie O'Farrell completest blog post, and all the books, links, and past episodes we mentioned today.
Follow our show on Instagram at @WhatShouldIReadNext and find me there at @AnneBogel.
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[00:41:56] Thank you to Maggie O'Farrell and Focus Features for making this episode possible. What Should I Read Next? is created each week by executive producer Will Bogel, Media production specialist Holly Wielkoszewski, social media manager and editor Leigh Kramer, community coordinator Brigid Misselhorn, community manager Shannan Malone, and our whole team at What Should I Read Next? and Modern Mrs. Darcy HQ. With help from the audio whizzes at Studio D Podcast Production.
Readers, that's it for this episode. Thanks so much for listening. And as Rainer Maria Rilke said, "Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading." Happy reading, everyone.
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