The 7 remarkable real-life settings that made Chloé Zhao’s Shakespearean tragedy, Canada Reviews

If you’ve read and loved Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel, Hamnet will be high on your new year’s viewing list. And Chloé Zhao’s lyrical, heart-rending and beautifully acted adaptation will absolutely live up to those high hopes. 

Helping Zhao craft Hamnet’s Tudor England, a lived-in world of Stratford townhouses, Warwickshire farms and London’s Globe Theatre, was Aussie production designer Fiona Crombie. Oscar nominated for her work on Yorgos Lanthimos’ 18th century comedy The Favourite, she was charged with recreating early 1600s England to backdrop the deep love and tragic family life of William Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) and Agnes Hathaway (Jessie Buckley). 

The result is an extraordinary, handcrafted evocation of Elizabethan England – right down to period-specific herbs and lumpy apples. ‘We talked about using green screen, but [we wanted] this movie to look as close to the real thing as it could be,’ Crombie tells .

Here’s how – and where – it was done.

1. William Shakespeare’s Stratford house was built at Elstree Studios

Along with the Globe Theatre itself, the movie’s key location is William Shakespeare’s Henley Street birthplace in Stratford-upon-Avon. It’s where the great playwright-to-be lives with his parents, the quietly compassionate Mary (Emily Watson) and bullying glove maker John (David Wilmot) – and where Agnes Hathaway comes to live when she conceives their first child, Susanna (Bodhi Rae Breathnach). It’s here that twins Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe) and Judith (Olivia Lynes) are born, too.

The home was built at Elstree in nine weeks, using reclaimed timbers and well-worn fabrics. ‘We took over a corner of the back lot,’ says Crombie. ‘We could hear Strictly Come Dancing filming at the same time. The production design dug into reference books and research to recreate the Tudor house, with its heavy beams. ‘I designed the house to box Will in the whole time,’ she says. ‘He’s constantly feeling the weight of that home. What does that do to his imagination?’ 

There was so much depth of feeling in that house

The production designer speaks about the house with pride, and even brought her children on set to visit it. ‘I don’t know what it was but there was so much depth of feeling in there. I think every single person that worked on this film would say the same thing. Jessie (Buckley) would sleep in her A-frame bedroom during the day. And [the actors would] be in the garden when they weren’t filming.’ 

There were occasional occupational hazards of working in a 16th century abode. ‘We had low ceilings and one beam that was lower than others,’ she remembers. ‘Joe Alwyn was the only really tall actor in the film and we had to watch out for Joe’s head. It was: “If you can clear Joe, you’re good.”’

Many productions have filmed at Elstree down the years – Hitchcock’s Blackmail, The Shining and Star Wars among them – but Hamnet is surely the first with its own garden. In the film, Agnes Hathaway’s elixirs are made from period-specific herbs – especially sage – that were sourced from that little Hamnet plot. ‘You couldn’t just can’t run down to Tesco to buy a bag of spinach, so we were growing it for ourselves,’ says Crombie. ‘I’d go to the garden every morning to see what was blooming and take it to dress the sets.’ 

You couldn’t just can’t run down to Tesco to buy a bag of spinach

The fruit in the Hathaway apple shed, where Will and Agnes conceive their first child, had its own back story too. ‘All the apples in [that scene] are from my set decorator’s mother’s home in Cornwall. They’re little and imperfect.’

2. The Hathaway farm was filmed in Herefordshire

The Hamnet team found their Hathaway farm, Hewlands, where William first encounters Agnes while working as a tutor, 70 miles west of the real deal in the Herefordshire hamlet of Cwmmau. ‘It was an amazing Tudor house,’ says Crombie. ‘We painted, we did heaps of work there: interior, exterior, we planted all the gardens, we re-fenced, we built barn structures. We were there for weeks prepping.’

📍How to stay at Cwmmau Farmhouse

3. 17th century Stratford is Weobley village in Herefordshire 

The nearby timber-framed village of Weobley was redressed to represent early 17th century Stratford. ‘Our carpenters built the period front [of the high street],’ remembers Crombie. ‘Then we resurfaced and did loads of dressing.’ The result was a period-ready settlement that passes effortlessly for Shakespeare’s hometown in the tightly focused shots Zhao and cinematographer Łukasz Żal use. ‘It can be such a danger where you do do those big establishers and go: “Ah ha! This is where we are.”’ says Crombie. ‘It was so important to stick with the characters in the film.’

‘Everyone loved Weobley and the people were so kind,’ she adds, ‘and they have a really good café, The Green Bean, that we all talk about to this day. There’d be all these painters, carpenters and set decorators in there ordering the full English.’

📍How to take a Hamnet walking tour of Weobley

4. The forest was filmed on Lydney Park Estate in Gloucestershire

Agnes Hathaway is a creature of the woods – the daughter of a forest witch, runs the local gossip – and William Shakespeare tentatively follows her into the sylvan realm that will one day backdrop his own comedies, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, As You Like It et al.

In Hamnet, it’s a darker, more spiritual place where Agnes gives birth curled in the roots of a tree, next to a gaping rent in the earth that seems to lead to the underworld itself. ‘That hole is a real place and we just sculpted around it,’ says Crombie of the forest location in Gloucestershire’s Lydney Park Estate. ‘We brought in more roots and kind of sculpted them so that [the tree] was enveloping her. I met Chloé for the first time in a car park in Wales and we went looking for that spot.’

📍How to visit Lydney Park Estate 

5. The puppet show was filmed at London Charterhouse

Over its 700 year history, Clerkenwell’s Charterhouse has been an almshouse, mansion and plague pit. Hamnet nods to that latter role by filming a scene where Will, new to London, witnesses a puppet show that foreshadows the arrival of the plague in England. ‘We wanted that change in architecture,’ notes Crombie of the choice of location. ‘It’s also walled – that courtyard, particularly. 

6. Shakespeare’s Hamlet monologue was filmed at Durham Wharf, London

Later in the movie, a desolate Will Shakespeare regals the inky, impassive River Thames with the Hamlet’s famous monologue from a Cheapside pier. ‘We redressed a real Thames pier and put the hut on the end,’ says Crombie. ‘Because of the tides, there was only one day we could shoot the scene.’ 

7. The Globe Theatre was built at Elstree Studios

Hamnet captures the first performance of Hamlet – the play inspired by Shakespeare’s young son – at Southwark’s Globe Theatre. That first iteration of the Globe, which was built in 1599 and burnt down in 1613, was replicated to two-thirds scale on the Elstree backlot. ‘When we went to visit the [current] Globe, I remember Chloé saying that it was too big,’ says Crombie, ‘and that ours needed to be more intimate – that it needed to feel like the inside of a tree. It was a great piece of direction because it gave me a visual approach.’

Building the theatre took 13 weeks and required some ingenious procurement work. ‘My supervising art director found out about a barn in France that was being dismantled,’ she remembers. ‘We got 20 tonnes of beautiful oak beams and the art directors allocated them up [for the different sets].’ 

‘There was a connection to the forest with the beams and the timber, and obviously in the forest cloth (pictured above) that’s the backdrop of the stage as well. It’s Agnes and Will’s life and history – their whole story together. Was it tough to see the theatre torn down at the end of the shoot? I couldn’t bear it! I’m pretending it’s still there.’

Hamnet is in UK and Ireland cinemas Fri Jan 8. Read our review here.

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