Maggie O’Farrell on Watching Hamnet Leap From Page to Screen

Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet has already had a rare literary afterlife: winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction and multiple major awards, a word-of-mouth bestseller, and now a Chloé Zhao–directed film that’s drawing raves on the festival circuit. The adaptation, led by Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal, recently picked up the TIFF People’s Choice Award, putting it firmly on the awards-season map.

In a new Focus Features Q&A, O’Farrell traces how a pair of stubborn questions about Shakespeare’s son became a novel, and then a screenplay she never meant to write.

The question that started Hamnet

For O’Farrell, Hamnet began with two linked mysteries: why Shakespeare gave his dead son’s name to his most famous play, and how the boy’s mother might have felt about that decision. “The best books that you can write often come from a set of questions without answers,” she explains in the interview with Focus Features.

The 2020 novel, which was also Waterstones’ Book of the Year, imagines the domestic life behind Hamlet: the romance between Will and Agnes, the birth of their twins, and the grief that shapes Shakespeare’s art. The film leans into that intimate focus rather than centering the playwright as untouchable genius, something O’Farrell credits to Zhao’s outsider perspective on the Shakespeare myth.

It’s part of a wider boom in literary adaptations, from Emily Henry’s romcoms to fantasy projects like Brandon Sanderson’s growing slate of screen deals, including those highlighted in our coverage of Sanderson’s expanding Cosmere on screen.

From reluctant screenwriter to award buzz

When Zhao first asked O’Farrell to co-write the script, the author’s plan was to politely decline. She’d never written a screenplay and had already moved on to another book. One Zoom call later, she had somehow promised a first draft in “a month or two.”

Working across time zones via marathon voice notes, Zhao and O’Farrell stripped 350 pages down to a 90-page script, rearranging the novel’s braided timelines into a clearer cinematic arc. Zhao brought a meticulous sense of pacing; O’Farrell guarded the narrative through-line, the “beads on a thread” that guide viewers through the family’s story.

Casting proved equally personal. O’Farrell had imagined Paul Mescal as Shakespeare ever since seeing him onstage as Stephen Dedalus, while Zhao’s choice of Jessie Buckley as Agnes struck the author as “a stroke of genius.” Buckley’s performance has already sparked early awards chatter, with the actor addressing the Oscar buzz in a recent interview with People.

With Focus Features handling U.S. distribution, Hamnet joins a crowded 2025 slate of page-to-screen releases, from Colleen Hoover to Bong Joon Ho’s Mickey17, continuing a trend we’ve been tracking in adaptations like Benedict Cumberbatch’s literary horror project.

Re-centering the boy behind the play

For all the awards and festival heat, O’Farrell says her goal hasn’t changed. “The main engine behind me writing the book was that I wanted more people to know about Hamnet, the boy,” she says. Historically, he has been a footnote in his father’s biography; the film, like the novel, insists on his centrality.

Onscreen, that reclamation becomes visceral: courtship scenes that play funnier than O’Farrell expected, Agnes’s devastating howl of grief, and the first staging of Hamlet unfurled before the audience’s eyes. If the novel opened a portal into Shakespeare’s house, the movie widens it, inviting viewers to see one of literature’s most famous plays as a family story first—and a masterpiece second.