After a detour into the superhero genre with 2021’s Eternals, Chloé Zhao, the Oscar-winning director of Nomadland, is back to contemplating the human condition—this time, in a romance-driven period piece steeped in literary lore.
Hamnet, adapted from Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel of the same name, imagines how loss inspired William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, a ghost story written just a few years after the death of his 11-year-old son. The film stars Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley as fictionalized versions of the Bard and his wife, Agnes, the two of whom share a whirlwind romance before the realities of domestic life set in and, eventually, grief threatens to tear them apart.
Hamnet’s production design and costumes suit the film’s intimate focus and scale, with Zhao’s camera lingering on a home full of family history and the objects of daily life, and evocative period garments made from natural materials.
Costume designer Malgosia Turzanska says that the visual language for Hamnet evolved naturally among Zhao and the film’s other lead creatives, including director of photography Łukasz Żal and production designer Fiona Crombie. The point was always to center the story and its people.
“I feel like the period movies that work the best are the ones that are actually focused on the characters rather than the confines of the period,” Turzanska, whose film credits also include The Green Knight and Pearl, tells Vogue. “And the really cool thing that happened was that, before we started prep, Chloé sent Łukasz, Fiona, and I each other’s lookbooks, and we were so on the same page. Everyone was driving with emotion rather than the period.”
Each of the film’s primary characters—from Will’s father and mother (played by David Wilmot and Emily Watson) to Agnes’s brother (Joe Alwyn) and the three youngest Shakespeares, which include twins Judith and Hamnet (Olivia Lynes and Jacobi Jupe)—had lovingly crafted wardrobes. But Turzanska’s talent for character-driven storytelling is most evident in the looks worn by Will and Agnes, which evolve as the young lovers mature into a married couple, parents, and then relative strangers following their son’s death.
For the headstrong, maternal Agnes, who is spiritually caught between the modern world and a more ancient, primal place, Turzanska used a palette of sanguine, rust, russet, crimson, and prune, inspired by the different stages of blood—from freshly oxidized to aged, clotted, and scabbed. The garments themselves are voluminous: with cartridge-pleated skirts or dresses paired with smocks, underskirts, and bodices that are layered or subtracted in number to mirror Agnes’ state of mind. All were constructed from organic fabrics, including bark cloth and an array of linens, and adorned with touches like tiny embroidered dashes and weaving patterns that mimic those made by tree-eating bugs.
“I didn’t want to overpower her with details, because ultimately she’s very kind of punk and very down-to-earth,” Turzanska says. “But from that very, very first bodice—which is bark cloth, the fiber underneath the tree—there was a bit of uneven, organic embroidery through her garments, especially through her bodices. There’s always something kind of weaving through.”
Agnes is also, Turzanska adds, “mostly wearing plants, starting with the literal [bark cloth] and then flax or linens with those little embroideries. So she’s very connected to nature and looks almost like she came out of it.”
Where textures, colors, and silhouettes evoking the natural world define Agnes’s garments—which, Turzanska notes, are “worn without any understructure,” as if the character is willfully disregarding the sartorial rules and mores of the period—Will’s belong very much to the world of man. They also borrow much more literally from the Elizabethan era and details from the Bard’s real life, as well as drawing from O’Farrell’s portrayal of Will’s father, a once-successful glove maker, as a violently embittered man.
Turzanska and her team used iron gall ink, the most popular ink during Shakespeare’s time, to dye Will’s garments into a variety of blues and grays that also appear in the other Shakespeares’ clothing. As Will trades the padded, protective doublets and flowing shirts of an unmarried playwright for more tailored, restrictive garb that seems to harden with him, the shades progressively lighten until the dominant color is ash. At the same time, quilted lines and laser scratching on leather evolve into increasingly pronounced slashes, achieved through a period-accurate technique known as pinking.
“I was imagining it was coming from the father, those little scratches,” Turzanska says, explaining that she pictured Will’s father, who wears a claw-like toothpick around his neck, physically picking away at his son during the film’s early scenes. “Even the quilting on his doublet—it almost looks like when you scratch the skin without breaking it, and there’s this differentiation of color.”
The costume designer adds that those subtle perforations become deeper cuts only when Will begins to doubt his own abilities as a father, and inflicts damage of his own. “Gradually, when we see him with the actual pinking on his leather shell, it’s when something switches within him,” Turzanska says, referring to a shift that occurs after Will and Agnes welcome their first baby, Susanna (Bodhi Rae Breathnach).
Fiona Crombie—who built the Shakespeare family residence and other key structures, including a version of the Globe Theatre, on a backlot at Elstree Studios outside of London—says that she also used the idea that there was “a history of violence” in the home to add depth to her design scheme.
“We only had nine weeks to basically turn plywood into a house that feels like it’s always existed,” Crombie says of fashioning the half-timbered Tudor and adjoining glove workshop, where Will, Agnes, and the children live alongside the other Shakespeares before moving to Stratford-upon-Avon. That was achieved through different painting and plastering techniques and strategically placed reclaimed oak, she says, but also through adding fabrics and furnishings that bore signs of extensive use (and misuse).
“Basically, everything has a scar,” she explains. “Almost every bowl has got some crack that’s been seamed. There’s cracks in the window panes; there’s missing spindles on the stairs; there’s evidence of where maybe a cup was thrown at the wall. It’s not overt, but there’s a little sense of history in details like that.”
Crombie, who was nominated for an Oscar for her work on The Favourite, has taken on plenty of ambitious projects in her time as a production designer. But she says that, unlike with some of her other films, she wasn’t aiming to create awe-inspiring structures for Hamnet. From Agnes’s family farm and the neighboring woods to the Shakespeare family’s home and its seasonal back garden, her goal was to invite viewers to connect with the characters, “rather than viewing them from afar, in a time gone by.”
“When I read the first draft, I felt this sort of immediate humanity in the script,” she continues. “And so I wanted very much to bring the audience close to this family. I didn’t want anything to be arm’s length about it. I wanted to bring them inside those doors and into that house and into that kitchen. And so it was really a case of how do you—in a world where there’s not masses of stuff—make that house and that family feel alive?”
Influenced by O’Farrell’s novel, Crombie focused on portraying the home as a hub of activity and general family life. The design process began with plucking references from her extensive location scouting with Zhao and Żal, which resulted in low, beamed ceilings throughout the home and workshop; displays of pewter and antiques; and a decorative wall treatment inspired by patterned canvas in the real Shakespeare home in Stratford-upon-Avon. On top of that, Crombie’s team layered in items like drying flowers and herbs in the kitchen, countless sewing tools in the workshop, and stacks of paper and quills where Will works.
“They’re not just people sitting around a parlor; there’s almost always a job to do,” Crombie says. “And that was something that I really wanted to show—this functioning family—because when that’s dismantled, you care.”
The production designer took a similar approach to recreating the original Globe, where most of Shakespeare’s plays debuted before it burned down in 1613. Playing off of the idea that the venue had been constructed from stolen timber by a fledgling theater company, Crombie used reclaimed oak from France to build a structure based on round barns in upstate New York and reminiscent of the inside of a tree. Her team then filled the back areas with costumes, props, and staging equipment, once again creating a lived-in setting for the film’s actors.
But the crowning touch was an onstage mural of spindly, dense trees that calls to mind Agnes’s beloved woods, and serves as the backdrop for the film’s climactic final scene: a production of Hamlet that reunites the grief-stricken couple. “We didn’t get there straight away, but we kept distilling that theater down to an essential image. And now, I keep seeing that image everywhere, and I’m like, ‘It’s so clear, it’s so simple, and it’s so evocative,’” Crombie says. “And it’s the same with, I think, what Malgosia did. It’s like she stripped it down to the essential.”