Shakespeare’s Hamlet as it has never been seen before is the essence of the reimagined tale starring Riz Ahmed. Now, after playing at the prestigious Toronto, London, and Telluride film festivals, the film will open in cinemas on April 10.
The critically acclaimed film reunites the Academy Award-winning team of Riz Ahmed and director Aneil Karia. Also, it features Morfydd Clark, Sheeba Chaddha, Avijit Dutt, with Art Malik, and Timothy Spall.
Shakespeare’s most enduring tragedy is transposed in a bold, modern adaptation set within London’s elite South Asian community. When Hamlet (Riz Ahmed) returns for his father’s funeral, he is stunned to discover his uncle Claudius is marrying his newly widowed mother. Visited by his father’s ghost, Hamlet learns his brutal murder was at the hands of Claudius – and spirals into a quest for vengeance that exposes the rot at the heart of the family’s empire and threatens his own sanity.
Check out the intense new trailer for HAMLET:
Speaking about the story of the film director says, “I read this adaptation and also went back to the original and realised that it spoke to a kind of filmmaking I thrived on – singular stories of humans that are unravelling. Hamlet is the ultimate version of that. Here is a person grieving and experiencing something wild, surreal, and almost supernatural. The more time I spent with the text, the more I realised this could actually be a very singular psychological portrait of a man in freefall. That made it very accessible and exciting for me. I wanted to tell the story exclusively from Hamlet’s perspective – we’re on his shoulder at all times. We’re breathing and feeling and experiencing the whole story with him. Then it becomes a more relentless, singular, visceral first-person version of the story.”
Being well-versed with the story, Riz found it spoke to him as a member of the British Pakistani community: “It felt like the play was written for me. It was a way of me feeling like these really classical ideas, these classical Western myths, were something that I could relate to and find myself in.”
About Riz as Hamlet, the director says, “I’ve always admired Riz as an actor because he seems to live and breathe the characters. He seems to go all in in a really deep, borderline kind of frightening way. We wanted to tell an intimate and sensory version of this story, and Riz delivers the verse with such raw emotion. I’ll never tire of marvelling at how he does it. There is such a power, presence, and potency to his performance.”
The director added, “I wanted to make something grounded, naturalistic – with a kind of feeling and atmosphere. A contemporary energy that speaks to the world. I found it interesting to tackle this kind of mythical, grand story in a way that would also allow for atmosphere and energy. So, that became our ‘North Star’, and the challenge to overcome.”
Hamlet’s experiences in the play hold up a mirror to society, something that Riz finds very powerful about the text: “These are questions that we all ask ourselves, but they seem more urgent now than ever before. You can either ignore it or look at it. Looking at it makes us feel like we are going crazy – we all have that feeling of, ‘Are you seeing this? Is this normal?’ But we carry on with our lives. There is something very urgent about this story, which is the power of Shakespeare. The power of this play is, whenever you tell the story, it feels like it’s about right now.”
Watch this space for more!
