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Where was Hamnet filmed? | CN Traveller
On Location peels back the curtain on some of your favourite films, television shows, and more. For this edition, we focus on Hamnet.
How do you make a movie in one of the most famous cultural landmarks on the planet? This is one problem that faced the crew filming Hamnet – a fictional account of William Shakespeare’s family life in Stratford-Upon-Avon and his professional one at The Globe theatre in London, based on Maggie O’Farrell’s award-winning novel. Unlike recent biopics of arts titans such as Bruce Springsteen, Maria Callas, or Bob Dylan, whose homes are not museums, the production team had to retell Shakespeare’s story in such historically significant locations as The Globe and the cottage of Anne Hathaway, Shakespeare’s wife. Take it from a Briton: you cannot shut down the still-very-lucrative present-day Globe for a movie shoot. Never. Gonna. Happen. Not even with Paul Mescal on board as the bard.
And yet, as Hamnet’s production designer Fiona Crombie tells Condé Nast Traveller, finding substitute locations wasn’t as tricky as you might think. A costume and production designer for many British historical pieces – Crombie was Oscar-nominated for her work in The Favourite – she has lived in the UK for more than a decade and was unfazed by the challenge. Here, she shares her most memorable locations in Hamnet.
We join the story from Anne Hathaway’s perspective. Also known as “Agnes” she was to become Shakespeare’s wife and mother to his three children: eldest Susanna, and twins Judith and Hamnet. Hamnet died at the age of 11 of the bubonic plague, and O’Farrell’s book explores the theory that Shakespeare’s most famous play, Hamlet, was shaped by his son’s death. O’Farrell also casts Agnes as a herbal healer who grew up on a farm with deep emotional ties to nature and the forest.
Agnes’ genuine home, “Hewlands” farm on the fringes of Stratford-upon-Avon, is now a tourist attraction (Anne Hathaway’s Cottage), so the team instead shot at Cwmmau in Herefordshire, a medieval farmhouse that is available for holiday rentals via the National Trust. “Our location manager was driving to a historic house that she’d heard had good potential, but those people didn’t answer the door,” says Crombie. “So, she carried on going and came across this listed farmhouse, which had never been on camera before. It was an amazing find. It’s got the perfect frontage, but because it’s a rental, it’s been renovated inside. We actually had to [temporarily] reverse all those modernisations before filming began.”
