Malgosia Turzanska on ‘Hamnet’ Costumes

With “Hamnet,” costume designer Malgosia Turzanska balanced the heart of Chloé Zhao‘s latest film, an adaptation of the novel by Maggie O’Farrell, and the period piece in which the film takes place. “The emotional core of it is so strong that it could exist anywhere. I wanted to make sure that I understood the characters as they are in the story, not get swayed by the big name of William Shakespeare,” Turzanska told WWD during a Zoom interview in early October.

The artist, known for “The Green Knight” and “Pearl,” walked WWD through the journey of crafting the costumes for the film and how the historic context of Elizabethan England served as a canvas for the tumultuous tale of love and loss.

“Hamnet” is a fictional account of William Shakespeare, played by Paul Mescal, and Anne “Agnes” Hathaway, played by Jessie Buckley, and how the loss of the couple’s son Hamnet, played by Jacobi Jupe, inspired Shakespeare to write his tragic play “Hamlet.”

Though Turzanska wanted her costuming to be informed by England’s late 16th and early 17th centuries, the character-driven story took precedent, focusing on how costuming served as an extension of Agnes and Will’s inner worlds. “Agnes is very connected to nature, but somehow I never imagined her in earth tones,” Turzanska said.

“She always was this red creature — the epitome of life. There’s this pumping blood. She is so vibrant and throbbing with life, almost like a heart muscle,” said the costume designer. But that vivid effervescence erodes after the loss of Hamnet.

“As she gradually moves through the story, I was very much thinking about blood, this fresh vibrant blood. And then gradually getting a little more rust after the loss of Hamnet,” Turzanska said of charting Agnes’ emotional journey through Buckley’s costuming. The bodices worn by Agnes became a significant piece for her dresses, with subtle embroidery mimicking “fresh flowing blood,” said Turzanska.

After Hamnet’s death, that blood red turns to “browns and prunes, purple shades,” with Turzanska’s team employing fabric that “truly looks like a scab; it looks like something that has died.” By the conclusion of the film, Agnes regains her bursting red tones, while, in contrast, Will remains in shades of blue and gray.

Inspired by the ink Shakespeare used to pen his comedies and tragedies, Turzanska imbued Mescal’s wardrobe with an inkiness, while also referencing Will’s connection to water. “Paul has ink-stained fingers throughout the movie. There’s ink staining on his clothes as well. And the blue-ish and gray-ish tones were from his to connection to water. We see him in several crucial moments [in the film] connecting with water and processing his thoughts by swimming or by speaking to the river.”

While the majority of “Hamnet” is dedicated to the intimate pastiches of Will and Anges’ family, the final act of the film centers on Shakespeare’s company and the opening performance of “Hamlet.” Turzanska found the task of costuming the play within the film the most “exciting part” of the production, likening her team’s experience to “this end-of-school play. For a while, I didn’t know what it was going to be, I just kind of let it sit and simmer.”

Turzanska and her team turned to a representative from The Globe, though the costume designer admittedly “knew from the beginning that accuracy is not going to be our friend.” The “Hamnet” Globe recreation is more compact and intimate, retaining the visual emotional language established from the beginning of the film. Grounding the final act with some historic relevance meant creating variations on Elizabethan costuming, a design that would feel tangible to the audience.

“I decided to keep the Elizabethan shapes but make them out of raw linen and just paint them with latex paint. It was very scary,” Turzanska said. “We built these beautiful things and then I was like, ‘am I just going to mess it all up and we have to start from scratch?’”

Of all the costumes for Shakespeare’s company, though, Turzanska was “most scared of” the ghostly clay cape of Hamlet’s father in the play. “I started looking at historical research, and the father is, a lot of the time, wearing a sheet or he’s wearing armor, which is referred to in the text,” said the costume designer.

But to maintain those emotional beats and intimate intertextuality, the costume designer thought more critically of what Hamlet’s father could represent in his costume and how the piece could serve the story to greater effect.

“I started thinking about where does the image of a ghost in a sheet come from? And it’s so obvious, but I didn’t clock that it is the sheet that the body is being wrapped in,” said Turzanska. The costume designer and her team weighed down their iteration of the ghostly sheet with clay that would dry and then crack. “It feels very visceral, somehow,” Turzanska said of the piece. “You understand that it was something that was in the earth, something that’s cracking, something that is morphing. It’s a cocoon that [Will’s] coming out of and it’s the moment that we finally see him crack.”

As Turzanska, Zhao and the rest of the “Hamnet” cast and creative team worked on the adaptation that vacillates between euphoric highs and hollowing lows, the costume designer’s own life imitated her art — Turzanska’s father was in a coma and later died during production. “[‘Hamnet’] informed and helped me go through my personal grief,” she said of the experience.

If qualities like knowledge and artistic talent led Turzanska’s costuming for “Hamnet,” her own grief journey certainly shaped the visual language of her costumes, endowing them with a tangible realism that shaped Shakespeare’s world. “I cannot imagine being on a different movie,” Turzanska said, grieving the creative process and experience she shared with fellow artists. “I loved everything.”