Chloe Zhao has had quite a week. Her latest film Hamnet opened over Thanksgiving, landed on the AFI Awards Top 10 Movies of 2025, and won her nominations for directing and screenplay (co-written with the book’s author Maggie O’Farrell) at both the Critics Choice Awards and the Golden Globes. It is also up for Best Picture at both.
This success brings her back to a familiar place as she is already a two-time Oscar winner for directing and writing 2020’s Nomadland and won a boatload of other honors for that film. In an unpredictable career, she followed up that very indie film with a big-scale Marvel movie, Eternals, and in this week’s edition of my Deadline video series, Behind the Lens she tells me she is very proud of both films, as well she should be.
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That also would go for Hamnet, a fictionalized piece of history about the life of William Shakespeare at the time he was writing his most famous play, Hamlet. It also follows the emotional family trauma he was experiencing in his marriage and with the loss of his 11-year-old son, Hamnet, and all the factors that transferred his pain into his art. Paul Mescal plays Shakespeare, and Jessie Buckley stars as his wife.
Zhao has gone through plenty of trauma herself for her art since making her first film, 2015’s Songs My Brother Taught Me. That is a film she basically got PTSD from. The day before starting shooting, she lost all her financing and then later was robbed of all her hard drives and footage of the movie. Somehow she made it through and on to a true critical triumph with 2017’s The Rider and then Nomadland.
In our conversation she explains why she initially said no to Hamnet producers Steven Spielberg and Sam Mendes, who brought the book to her, and actually continued to say no until her casting choices were firmly in place with Mescal — whom she first approached blindly (she didn’t know who he was) while both were at the Telluride Film Festival — and Buckley. But finally she realized it really triggered something within her and she had to put her own fears and resistance aside to make this film.
Among other topics we talk about her most recent project, directing the pilot of theBuffy the Vampire Slayer series reboot and why she thinks fandom expectations for that one are much scarier than any reservations she had on Hamnet. She also says she is a lifelong fan herself, in her case Japanese manga. We also talk about a number of other things including why she likes working with non-actors, her need for oneness and so much more.
To watch our conversation and to go “behind the lens” with Chloe Zhao, just click the link above.
Join me every Monday this Oscar season for anther edition of Behind the Lens, and every Wednesday for a new episode of The Actor’s Side.