The film adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet has found its director.
Chloé Zhao will helm the movie, which is being developed by a group of production companies including Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Partners, Deadline reports.
O’Farrell’s novel, published in 2020 by Knopf, follows William Shakespeare’s wife, Agnes Hathaway (more commonly known as Anne Hathaway), whose life is thrown into disarray after the death of their 11-year-old son, Hamnet.
The book was a critical success, winning the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Women’s Prize for Fiction. In a starred review, a critic for Kirkus called the novel “a gripping drama of the conflict between love and destiny.”
Zhao is known for directing the 2020 film Nomadland, for which she won Golden Globe and an Oscar, and the 2021 Marvel movie Eternals. She is writing a film adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which she plans to direct.
Zhao will co-write the adaptation of Hamnet with O’Farrell. Sam Mendes, the Academy Award–winning director of films including American Beauty, Road to Perdition, and Revolutionary Road, is among the film’s producers.
The film won’t be the first adaptation of Hamnet. The Royal Shakespeare Company’s stage adaptation of the novel opened in Stratford-upon-Avon earlier this month, and is scheduled to move to London in September.
Michael Schaub, a journalist and regular contributor to NPR, lives near Austin, Texas.
