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Hammet just didn’t make sense to Sir Ian McKellen.
“I don’t quite get it,” the Tony and Laurence Olivier Award-winning actor confessed on Saturday in an interview with The Times.
“I’m not very interested in trying to work out where Shakespeare’s imagination came from, but it certainly didn’t just come from family life,” he remarked.
Chloe Zhao’s film is based on the 2020 novel by Maggie O’Farrell, which imagines the origin of William Shakespeare’s literary tragedy Hamlet.
The book tells the story of the death of the great playwright’s 11-year-old son, Hamnet’s death and the grief that follows.
O’Farrell’s narrative was inspired by the scholarly debate that highlights the fundamentals — Hamnet’s burial in 1596 and Hamlet‘s first staging four years later.
“As Hamnet races towards the finishing line, as far as Oscars are concerned, it’s likely to repeat the success of Shakespeare in Love, which had odd views as to how plays get put on,” said McKellen.
“But then Shakespeare’s perhaps the most famous person who ever lived, so of course there is some interest in what he looked like, what his relationship with his family was. And we can’t know,” the Lord of the Rings star said.
He pointed out another irony in the imagined narrative, saying, “The idea Anne Hathaway has never seen a play before? It’s improbable, considering what her husband did for a living. And she doesn’t seem to know what a play is! I think there are a few doubts of probability.”
The actor gave his opinion on the subject with some authority as he owes his early acting success to performances with the Royal Shakespeare Company out of London’s Royal National Theatre.
Hamnet stars Paul Mescal as Shakespeare, Jessie Buckley as Agnes or Anne Hathaway and also features Emily Watson, Joe Alwyn, and Noah Jupe.
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