EXCLUSIVE: To play or not to play Hamlet, that was never the question for Oscar Isaac.
He had long wanted to take on one of the most complex and demanding roles ever conceived, the titular Prince of Denmark.
“Sam Gold — the director — and I had been working on Hamlet for about 12, 13 years,” Isaac tells Deadline. “We had worked with it at Julliard; we were both students there. We had done all the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern scenes as a one-act play, basically. And I had worked on it a lot. We would read it together, and so we always just knew it was going to happen at one point, and finally the time came to do it.”
‘Hamlet’ director Sam Gold (left) with Oscar Isaac
Mad Gene Media
That time came in 2017 in a production for the Public Theater in New York with Gold directing. The process of how it came together, how Isaac brought his distinctive interpretation to Shakespeare’s Dark Dane at a time when so much was swirling in his personal life, is told in the documentary King Hamlet, directed by the actor’s wife, filmmaker Elvira Lind. It was just announced this morning as premiering at the Telluride Film Festival on Friday, with an encore screening on Sunday.
We have your first look at King Hamlet in the teaser-trailer above.
Oscar Isaac and Elvira Lind
Oscar Isaac/Bruce Glikas/Telluride Film Festival
“We’re super, super excited. It feels like the perfect place for this to be birthed,” Lind says of the Telluride bow. “It’s such a personal, beautiful festival.”
“There’s just a bit more of a communal feeling there” at Telluride, Isaac adds. “And so the fact that we get to show this very personal, heartfelt film with people there, it feels exactly right.”
Many previous productions of Hamlet have emphasized the prince’s drive to avenge his father’s death – King Hamlet – at the hands of his uncle, the dastardly Claudius. But in the teaser-trailer, Gold articulates a different interpretation.
“Murder and revenge are not the play we are here to do,” he tells his assembled actors. “This is about grief.”
Isaac himself was immersed in grief at that time in 2017, experiencing the loss of his mother, Maria Hernández. It was simultaneously a joyous time in the lives of Lind and Isaac, as the couple was about to welcome their first child, a boy they would name Eugene (in honor of his mother’s full name, María Eugenia Estrada Nicolle). Oscar and Elvira also got married, in a rooftop ceremony in Manhattan. All those emotions – the elation and sorrow – are shared in a film of remarkable intimacy. Sharing so much of their personal lives was not the easiest of decisions.
Oscar Isaac with his son, Eugene
Mad Gene Media
“I think there was an understanding that this might not ever see the light of day,” Isaac admits. “In a way, that had to be the understanding in order for us – I think for both of us — to feel comfortable filming these things. It was maybe, ‘This will just be for us as this little keepsake that we have. Maybe it’ll just be footage that lives in a hard drive that we will revisit one day because it is very painful things. Beautiful things as well. And also, perhaps there isn’t even a film in there. We don’t know.’ It’s just a lot of things happening and Elvira very wisely and gently allowing herself to capture these things. And that’s also why it was put away for so long. This happened in 2017, so it was a long incubation time.”
Lind’s film also documents the intense physical and mental exertion required of Isaac to pull off the role of Hamlet.
“My camera is a bit of an extension of me, so I asked if I should follow the workshop and if we should try and see what would happen if we filmed some of it. We just kind of started there,” recalls Lind. “Then in that [rehearsal] room, it was the most electrifying experience. Being there and filming it, it was almost like the material just became alive in a really interesting way. You’re standing for that long, holding a camera, changing lenses, with a monitor, and I just remember my arms being completely numb, but I just couldn’t stop. Going in and capturing these moments was so, so beautiful and hearing them work with the text was just really captivating.”
The New York Times’ Ben Brantley, in a review published July 13, 2017, called the production “gloriously involving,” noting that the actors were attired in contemporary street clothes – or less. “I totally bought Hamlet’s running around in his underpants for his ‘antic disposition’ scenes,” he wrote. He described the cast as “top-flight,” singling out Isaac’s Hamlet as “majestically impudent.”
I asked Isaac if he found Brantley’s characterization just.
“When you’re in your underwear running around stabbing lasagnas, that’s quite ‘majestically impudent,’ I guess,” he laughed. “Reciting, ‘Oh, what a rogue!’ while you’re in your tighty whities.”
It required an immense effort to memorize the classic text, of course, and Isaac is seen in the film going over his lines at home, in the car, whenever he has a spare moment. Eight years on, could he hop back on stage as Hamlet without a moment’s notice?
(L-R) Director Elvira Lind and Oscar Isaac on September 7, 2023 in New York City.
Arturo Holmes/Getty Images
“I could,” he affirms. “And we did a four-hour version with two intermissions… I had worked on it for so long and it became almost liturgical for me. Especially preparing for it, I found, it has the same ambiguity and the mysterious alchemy of a religious text… It’s a hall of mirrors that keeps changing with you, and it asks a question which asks another question and just continues and continues. So yeah, I think there’s a real reason why we keep coming back to it. It has that kind of power.”
Oscar Isaac in Guillermo Del Toro’s ‘Frankenstein’
Netflix
Isaac is currently at the Venice Film Festival for the world premiere of Frankenstein, director Guillermo del Toro’s cinematic adaptation of the Mary Shelley novel, in which Isaac stars alongside Jacob Elordi and Christoph Waltz. He will fly to Telluride in time for Sunday’s second screening of King Hamlet and then return to Venice after that.
Since his performance in Hamlet, his family has expanded: he and Lind welcomed a second son, Mads, in 2019. Older brother Eugene turned 8 this year.
I asked if the couple planned to show King Hamlet to their eldest boy.
“He’s definitely very keen to watch it. He’s watched parts of it,” Lind shares.
“He’s asked for top billing,” notes Isaac.
“Yeah, he wanted to see if his name could be featured right at the top,” continues Lind. “Our other son, we had to put in too. He wasn’t born yet, obviously [when Hamlet was on at the Public], but there’s a little soundbite of him in there just so he could feel part of it too.”
Watch the teaser-trailer for King Hamlet above.
