‘Hamnet’s Paul Mescal And Cillian Murphy

EXCLUSIVE: Paul Mescal was backstage in the Picturehouse Central green room where he was awaiting the arrival of fellow Irishman, Oscar-winning Cillian Murphy who was to grill him, in the nicest possible way, about his portrait of William Shakespeare in Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet, a movie that features an Earth-mother performance of shattering proportions by Jesse Buckley as Shakespeare’s wife Agnes.

The film is based on Maggie O’Farrell’s best-selling novel that imagines how Agnes and Will meet. Well, it’s definitely animal lust when they meet, I can tell you that.

But the heart of the film is how they cope with the loss of their son, the Hamnet of the title, and how they survive the worst of all tragedies; parents losing a child. Out of that pain, it’s suggested, comes great art. And that resulting art from Shakespeare is of course Hamlet — perhaps the world’s most performed drama.

 I had some time with Mescal away from his Q&A session with Murphy and I asked Mescal whether he’d met bereavement counsellors or spoken to people about the death of a child.

“I felt slightly uncomfortable with the process of asking someone directly, but I did lots of reading online,” he said. “Just looking at statistics about what happens to a married couple, because I wanted to leave a lot of it up to how I imagined something like that would be.”

I don’t think Shakespeare was making plays to show off his talent. I think he was making plays and making work to communicate something about the world.

His voice soft and quiet now, he continued, “Because the one thing that I found is that there’s lots of differences across the spectrum of things that couples and individuals feel in it, but the kind of thing that homogenized it all was the fact that it’s a miracle if any couple really survives the death of a child. There’s many things that are remarkable about both Agnes and Will, but the main thing to me was that they still managed to find a way back to each other. And that’s what kind of breaks my heart. That’s always something that happens in a far away land. And to other people. And unfortunately there’s a percentage of people in the world where it happens to them.”

I asked him how he avoided that painful cliché when actors portray famous folk, because his character is Shakespeare before he’s, well, Shakespeare the Bard of Stratford-Upon-Avon.

That cliché drives him crazy too, he said. Also, that’s not how the character is presented in the novel so it was never an issue. “So it would have felt surprising to me if suddenly a filmmaker like Chloé was like, ‘Do you know what I want to do? I want to make this about the great William Shakesespeare.’ So that was never really a conversation that we had,” he explained.

He went on, “Of course, you see his brilliance in his work when you see it in the final act, but it’s not about how brilliant the play is. It’s about what he’s doing for his son with the play, which is much more exciting to me… I don’t think Shakespeare was making plays to show off his talent. I think he was making plays and making work to communicate something about the world.” 

“Generally,” he added, “I think the best artists are making things to serve their talent. They’re making it because they have something to say, and that to me felt like I could draw a line between me and Shakespeare with that, as I think many artists can. What I couldn’t draw a line between is going, ‘Do you know who I feel close to as William Shakespeare?’ I find that too big a gap to try and service.”

Also, thankfully, Mescal has avoided the cliché of him, where thespians who’ve portrayed him in the past ensure that you know they’re playing bloody Shakespeare, you know, bowed head and learned. “It’s well trodden,” he said.

“Also, I think there’s nothing to testify that the cliché is accurate and what I’m doing isn’t. It’s like what I’m doing could be totally off-the-mark, but to me it felt true. That’s how, when I read his plays, I think there’s an animal in his work. He’s a heart animal. He’s not a head animal to me.”

And, I told him, there is an immediate sensual rawness between Agnes and Will the moment they meet. Mescal smiles and says, “That’s just what it feels like as a young person to be like in love!” Then corrected himself, saying that really, the moment reflects a couple of any age.

I wondered how he got his mind and body ready for the shoot? “The tone of the piece informs it subconsciously,” he said, “It just felt to me that he’s very much rooted. He’s not away with the fairies and up in the sky. He’s like snarling on all fours. So again, it’s tied to the thing of not trying to be overly conscious with my choices. The feeling that I had when I read the book and when I read the script, and when I knew I was going to be working with Jesse and Chloé was, this just feels like the film that we were always going to make in terms of the tone. And then you have to go and make it, and then it becomes a different thing.”

To me it was a chip I had on my shoulder.  It was like I always thought Shakespeare belonged to English and British people.

When he auditioned, he was playing Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire and felt, he said, “There was a kind of energy that I was carrying into that that I don’t think screams ‘William Shakespeare’, but actually it was something that Chloé was interested in, and something that I had got great joy out of actually playing on stage where I was was thinking, ‘Oh, this is a color that I don’t think maybe people necessarily associate with me or my work.’ But it’s something that I think is latent in me that I found very useful.”

He agreed with my assessment that there’s a freedom about his performance, and he believes that’s because with playing Shakespeare it’s “interior until it’s not, and then it’s utterly expressive,” noting that maybe “there’s an ease that comes with that” for the audience.

Nonetheless, Mescal believes that there’s a fundamental weight to Shakespeare, “especially as he gets older and is going through the grieving process. But I don’t think that the performance is like laden down… He’s not like trudging through his life. He’s like a bulldozer, but I think bulldozers can be pretty heavy.”

When he was in school in Ireland, the actor says that there was always “a barrier” in his head concerning Shakespeare. “To me it was a chip I had on my shoulder.  It was like I always thought Shakespeare belonged to English and British people.”

He’s amused that there’s a film about Shakespeare “that’s directed by a Chinese woman with a predominantly Polish crew and two Irish people at the center of it.”

“I actually don’t think it has anything to do with the nationality,” he said. “I think it’s funny that it ends up being us, but I think that there’s something exciting about the kind of quality that Jesse brings and that I bring, and we bring together, that I don’t think is necessarily what you expect when you first think Anne Hathaway and William Shakespeare, which I think serves the film, because it kind of tilts the axis or the perspective a little bit.”

Buckley and Mescal are actors, for heaven’s sake, trained to take on any role. Nationality be damned. However, when I originally heard about Buckley and Mescal being cast in Hamnet, I chuckled because of the larks I imagined they’d have during filming. Was there craic to be had, I asked Mescal, using the term the Irish use when referring to having a good time.

“Oh, absolutely,” said Mescal, as an enormous smile spreading across his face.

“I mean, that’s what’s hard to communicate sometimes, is that the film is spoken about in terms of it making people upset. And of course it is that, but there was lots of joy to be found in it, because I think that that’s the joy of making something that is cathartic, even if it’s emotional, it’s that you’re totally relieved as an artist that you’re feeling that. You’re like, ‘Thank f–k! We must be doing something right!’ at least in our own heads… I think the thing that we were feeling on the day is the thing that audiences are feeling when they sit in a room and it’s like so exciting to me to see like the box office figures that the film did here this weekend. It’s incredibly exciting to me.”

I know that everybody says that they love everybody that they work with, generally. But for me I can hold my hand up and say that’s categorically true.

Talking of craic, I found it hilarious that following the screening, some of us trudged over to the posh Devonshire pub just off Piccadilly Circus where, among other tipples on offer, there were rows of perfectly poured glasses of the Irish stout known as Guinness. Can’t stand the stuff myself, and I was amused to see that Mescal wasn’t seen to be sipping the black brew.

Mescal is also starring with his pal Josh O’Connor in The History of Sound, directed by Oliver Hermanus from Ben Shattuck’s novella about two musicologists. They meet in a Cambridge, Massachusetts bar in 1916  and instantly bond over their appreciation of regional folk songs.

Lionel, Mescal’s character, has synesthesia, where he can see color and see and feel emotions when he listens to music. It’s a deeply poignant movie, and as with Hamnet, it’s about loss. That was another collaboration of which he’s proud. He said, “I’ve been very lucky with the people that I’ve got to work with,” and adds that he hasn’t worked with anybody that he doesn’t “deeply admire”.

Grinning now, he added that it makes him nervous every time he goes on a press tour “because I have to go in and say, ‘I love’ this person, and I know that everybody says that they love everybody that they work with, generally. But for me I can hold my hand up and say that’s categorically true.”

My sense about Mescal, having interviewed him and met him many times since his arrival in the series Normal People, is that he’s an actor first, who goes after the work; the stardom bit just happens to come with the territory he now inhabits.

“I went to drama school to be an actor, not a movie star,” he said shyly. “Unless I suddenly have a different relationship to myself, I will aways identify as an actor. I might be very surprised if that changed, because I think my priorities would have to change. And I’m living the life that I couldn’t have been dreamt of and it requires…” He then paused for a moment, drawing on something George Clooney says in Jay Kelly. “Clooney says something like, “It’s one thing to achieve that [stardom] but then you want to hold onto it, and that requires work and that’s not even to be a star, it’s to be an actor.”

Prior to being in central London for the night, Mescal had been on the set of the Paul McCartney segment of the quartet of films Sam Mendes is shooting about The Beatles. But he swatted away questions about that and how it’s being shot and simply said, “It’s a feat. It’s a big old set of movies.”

Then, Cillian Murphy arrived in the green room in the nick of time! He was saving his friend from having to answer my questions about the Fab Four.

Earlier, I’d been over at Sony for a screening of 28 Years Later:The Bone Temple, and Murphy has long been associated with the series of movies featuring survivors of a virus who flee the flesh-eating ‘infected’. I couldn’t eat for a day after seeing the new film. There should be a warning that people shouldn’t eat popcorn during it, Mescal said. Popcorn is OK if they chomp it quietly, he decided. It’s people opening cans of water in theaters that drives him really crazy though. “It’s a f–king nightmare,” Mescal said, making a hissing noise to demonstrate opening a can.

What gets Murphy’s goat though, is people being served dinner during a movie. “Eat before you go,” he said.

“Or after,” Mescal chimed in.

I can see why these actors have become stars. They have a playfulness abut them. And charisma. And Mescal has it in spades.

Someone who knows that for sure is Duncan Kenworthy, the award-winning producer of Notting Hill, Love Actually and Four Weddings and a Funeral, who attended the screening and reception. At one point he was deep in conversation with Mescal .

I asked Kenworthy if he had a romantic comedy up his sleeve for the star. His response was: “It would be good, wouldn’t it?” He’s mighty impressed with Mescal as an actor. “He’s incredibly charismatic,” he said.

Can’t argue with that.

Check back here for the full video of Mescal’s conversation with Murphy.