Inside the design of Hamnet, a tale of Shakespeare’s real tragedy

In Hamnet, director Chloé Zhao’s new film based on Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel of the same name, there’s a moment when William Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) stages one of his first performances. It isn’t yet at London’s Globe Theatre, but in his own backyard in the English countryside. He leads his wife, Agnes (Jessie Buckley), out the back door, blindfolded. When the cloth is lifted, she finds herself the audience to a small epic: their son, the titular Hamnet, wears a woven sack turned cape, while their daughters dart through makeshift parapets of brush and bloom.

As Hamnet moves between the intimacy of family life and the spectacle of theatre, every location reads as a kind of stage; a distinct zone in which a drama unfolds. 'From beginning to end, it was a process of uncovering and discovery,' says production designer Fiona Crombie. She and Zhao often discussed how the visual world could perform for the narrative as much as the actors themselves.

Crombie, known for her work on period films such as The King and The Favourite, admits she once had little affection for Tudor architecture, that hallmark of Shakespeare’s era, with its whitewashed walls framed by heavy timber. Returning to the period for Hamnet, she found new meaning in its strict geometry. As Mescal’s Shakespeare moved through the domestic space, she began to see ‘boxes everywhere – all these lines where he’s constrained by a building’. That confinement became a counterpoint to Buckley’s Agnes, whose spirit is inseparable from the forest bordering their home. ‘There ends up being this interesting visual contrast,’ Crombie says, ‘of Agnes being out in this rambling nature and then coming to be contained by these boxes.’

Whereas the traditional forms of Tudor architecture fit naturally into the story’s dynamics, the iconic Globe Theatre required subtle adaptation. Crombie repositioned the Globe’s dressing room from its traditional perch overlooking the stage to a more grounded, eye-level view so that William could be closer to, and connect more intimately with, Agnes as she experiences his play from the audience.

‘You research, you understand, and then you extract what you need and bend it,’ she says of not strictly replicating the historic theatre. 'It’s to serve the story – to serve how you want your audience to feel.’ In Hamnet, this idea extends beyond architecture. The stage becomes a place where life shapes art and art, in turn, reshapes life. The theatre offers structure, a container for narrative, yet that narrative constantly strains against its frame, spilling outward into lived experience. Crombie’s imagined world for Zhao’s Shakespearean tale captures that tension: a space grounded in history, yet flexed to hold emotion, memory, and invention all at once.

Hamnet is on limited release in the US from 26 November 2025, and wider US release from 12 December. It’s in UK cinemas from 9 January 2026