I always wanted Paul Mescal to play Shakespeare, says O’Farrell

The writer of Oscar-tipped movie Hamnet has said she always saw Paul Mescal taking on the role of Shakespeare in the film adaption.

Maggie O’Farrell recalled seeing Mescal in the role of Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in Dublin before his break-out role in the hit show Normal People.

Based on O’Farrell’s award-winning novel of the same name, Hamnet is a fictional account exploring the lives of William Shakespeare, his wife Agnes and their family.

It delves into the impact of the death of Agnes and William’s son, Hamnet, and how it could have influenced one of Shakespeare’s most enduring masterpieces, Hamlet.

O’Farrell was born in Coleraine, County Londonderry, to Irish parents, but grew up in Wales and Scotland.

“I mostly grew up in Britain but we would visit Ireland all the time throughout my childhood, it is a very important part of my identity and who I am,” she said.

The film has a particularly Irish feel by O’Farrell’s own admission with actress Jessie Buckley taking on the role of Agnes.

O’Farrell joked that upon hearing the cast, she had said to director and co-writer Chloé Zhao: “Did you actually do any auditions or did you just go on holiday to Ireland?”

According to O’Farrell, Zhao had always wanted Buckley to take on the role of Agnes, something she was “totally on board with”.

“She is a dream Agnes, she does an incredible job inhabiting that character,” she said.

O’Farrell said she had always wanted Mescal for the role of Shakespeare.

“I saw him years ago at the Gate Theatre playing Stephen Dedalus… even then he stood out a mile,” she said.

“There is an interesting thematic link between Stephen Dedalus and Hamlet, so I always kept saying Paul Mescal, Paul Mescal.”

Speaking about researching for her novel, O’Farrell said: “There are no shortage of books on Shakespeare.”

“You could spend the rest of your life reading books about Shakespeare and quite a lot of people do.”

O’Farrell read extensively about the playwright but said there is still “awful lot about his biography we don’t know”.

“There is not a lot written about Shakespeare’s wife or his mother or his daughters,” she said.

“They are people whose history has been written in water and they are very much footnotes in his story.”

In order to understand the lives of the female characters, O’Farrell said the research was “more hands on”.

“I did learn to fly a kestrel, which is actually the most fun thing I have ever done in the name of work,” she said.

“I made bread using a Tudor recipe, I planted my own Elizabethan medicinal garden and I went on a course to find out how to turn plants into medicines.”

In the book, Agnes is rumoured to be the daughter of a forest witch.

She can be seen in the film with spending time with her pet hawk and picking herbs for medical concoctions.

Initially, O’Farrell was unsure about being involved in the writing process for the film but said Zhao was a “very persuasive person”.

“It’s been really interesting, I feel like I’ve learned an awful lot but I was apprehensive at the beginning,” she said.

“I know how to construct a narrative for the page but I didn’t really know how to construct one for cinema.”

However, O’Farrell said she and Zhao have “different but compatible skills”.

“She’s very good at the macro vision of what the film needed to be and she had a clear idea of which threads of the books she was going to keep”, she said.

Meanwhile, O’Farrell said she could help when it came to creating scenes with 16th Century dialogue.

“My kids call me a neek,” she joked, “it’s a cross between a geek and a nerd”.

Hamnet has received six Golden Globe nominations in total, including best actress in drama for Buckley and best supporting male actor for Mescal.

The film will be released in UK cinemas on 9 January.