Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal confirmed to star in adaptation of Maggie O'Farrell's Hamnet

It has finally been confirmed that two Irish stars will share the screen in Chloe Zhao's adaptation of Maggie O' Farrell's multi award-winning novel Hamnet.

All of Us Strangers star Paul Mescal is set to grace the screen alongside I'm Thinking of Ending Things actress Jessie Buckley. The Oscar nominated pair are to play the roles of a young William and Agnes Shakespeare stricken with grief after the loss of their child.

This is not the first time the actors have worked on the same production, having previously starred in Maggie Gyllenhaal's film, The Lost Daughter. However in Gyllenhaal's film, the actors did not share a scene.

Set in Stratford, England, in the late 16th century, Hamnet imagines the emotional, domestic, and artistic repercussions after the world's most famous (though never named) playwright and his wife lose their only son, 11-year-old Hamnet, to the bubonic plague in 1596. Four years later, the boy's father transposes his grief into his masterpiece — titled with a common variant of his son's name — in which the father dies and the son lives to avenge him.

When asked in an interview with Vogue about starring alongside Buckley in Zhao’s next film, Mescal said: “That book - it’s just devastating. I can’t wait. If I told a younger version of myself that this would be [shooting] this year, I wouldn’t believe it."

Speaking on his co-star Mescal said he was excited to work with Buckley: "I’ve obviously been in a film with Jessie before but we’ve never shared the screen or a working process together. I think she’s one of our present-day greats. And Chloé is somebody I can’t wait to get in the weeds with, and get into the heads of those characters.”

Oscar-award winning director Zhao is co-writing the adapted screenplay with O' Farrell, who won the 2020 Women’s Prize for Fiction and the Fiction Prize at the 2020 National Book Critics Circle Awards for Hamnet. The book was shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize and longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction.

Production of Hamnet is set to begin in late April.