Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal To Join Director Chloé Zhao's Amblin Film HEMNET

Jessie Buckley (Men) and Paul Mescal (Gladiator 2) are set to join director Chloé Zhao’s upcoming film adaptation of the historical fiction novel Hamnet for Amblin Partners.

The film will tell the story of Agnes, “the wife of the world’s most famous writer, William Shakespeare – as she struggles to come to terms with the loss of her only son, Hamnet. The novel charts the emotional, familial and artistic consequences of that loss, bringing to life a human and heart-stopping story as the backdrop to the creation of The Bard’s Hamlet.”

Here’s the description of the story:

In 1580’s England, during the Black Plague a young Latin tutor falls in love with an extraordinary, eccentric young woman in this “exceptional historical novel” (The New Yorker) and best-selling winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction.

Agnes is a wild creature who walks her family’s land with a falcon on her glove and is known throughout the countryside for her unusual gifts as a healer, understanding plants and potions better than she does people. Once she settles with her husband on Henley Street in Stratford-upon-Avon she becomes a fiercely protective mother and a steadfast, centrifugal force in the life of her young husband, whose career on the London stage is taking off when his beloved young son succumbs to sudden fever.

A luminous portrait of a marriage, a shattering evocation of a family ravaged by grief and loss, and a tender and unforgettable re-imagining of a boy whose life has been all but forgotten, and whose name was given to one of the most celebrated plays of all time, Hamnet is mesmerizing, seductive, impossible to put down—a magnificent leap forward from one of our most gifted novelists.

Zhao (Eternals) will direct the film from a script written by the book’s author, Maggie O’Farrell. There’s a solid team of talent here and this sounds like it will tell an interesting story. The film is being produced by Liza Marshall, Pippa Harris, Sam Mendes, Nic Gonda, and Jeb Brody.