Oscar-Nominated Casting Director Nina Gold Knew Jessie Buckley Was the One for “Hamnet”

Maggie O’Farrell’s award-winning 2020 novel, “Hamnet,” is a work of historical fiction that traces a day in the life and death of William Shakespeare’s only son, Hamnet. The novel’s focus, however, is Agnes, Shakespeare’s wife, and her unusual gifts, family background, and courtship and marriage to Will. O’Farrell also co-wrote the screenplay for her novel’s film adaptation, centering the story around Agnes’s life and her relationship with Will and all three of her children. Directed by Chloé Zhao, Hamnet is up for Best Picture, and its star, Jessie Buckley, is nominated for a Best Actress Oscar for her powerful portrayal of Agnes, a woman who is both an enduring household name and something of a historic mystery.

Buckley’s performance as a mother who knows better than anyone else how to save her child from the plague and yet cannot is heart-wrenching. As her spouse, Paul Mescal plays two roles at once: devoted husband and father, and a creatively driven family man in absentia. And then there are the twins, Judith and Hamnet, a pair whose special bond casting director Nina Gold (Conclave, Star Wars: Episode IX) prioritized over twinning looks, casting non-siblings Olivia Lynes and Jacobi Jupe to take on these difficult roles. For her work on Hamnet, Gold is among the inaugural group of nominees in the Oscars’ new achievement in casting category. We got to speak with the veteran casting director about her surefire casting of Buckley for Agnes, the long process of finding the right young actors for the twins, and her unusual approach to the film’s background artists.

Did you use both the book and the script to inform your casting choices, or only the script?

I had read the book when it first came out. I was pretty familiar with the book and loved it. The script was a more pared-back version of the characters in the book. Even though they’re all very intimately connected, you have to start to leave the book behind to get into the script, and then you eventually have to leave the script behind to make it a real live human being, being the character instead of the words on the page. So we followed that trajectory.

How did you know Jessie Buckley was the one for the role of Agnes?

I have always loved Jessie Buckley. I’ve cast her a couple of times before, and I’ve watched every single thing she’s ever done. I’ve gotten to know her quite well over the years. She’s so phenomenal, and everything about her seemed to cry out that she should be Agnes.

Was director Chloé Zhao involved in her casting?

We agreed on that pretty quickly.

What were you looking for in casting the twins, Judith and Hamnet?

That was the big, terrifying challenge. Casting kids is quite daunting, and then they have to be twins, and then they have to perform this really demanding stuff. They have to play death, basically, and grief. I’ve done quite a lot of casting kids, and I haven’t figured the way to cut the corners. You have to do a lot of legwork and meet a lot of kids, because you just don’t know. It’s not like you can look back on a body of work and have your thoughts. So we really did a pretty labor-intensive, ground-covering meeting of a lot of children. Even though, I’ll have to say, I had met Jacobi about a year before and did have in the back of my mind that there was this absolutely incredible little boy out there that I thought could be quite amazing.

Did you meet him through another casting?

I’d brought him in for something else, and he’d been totally great, but the wrong age. And there was also a moment of thinking about whether we should be trying to cast real twins, which was pretty scary. We really did look at all sorts of people, but in the end, it seemed clear we should be going for Jacobi and Olivia.

What kind of qualities in a young Shakespeare led you to Paul Mescal?

The key was to stop worrying about the idea of him being Shakespeare and to be the man we meet in this story. It was also incredibly key that he would have this real chemistry and connection with Jessie, which, boy, did that explode. And he’s just a really sensitive, clever, nuanced, truthful actor, which seemed like all the things we needed him to be.

What was the key to finding Agnes’s brother, Bartholomew?

We talked about Bartholomew as someone who would be like a tree she could lean on. [Joe Alwyn] really understood that. There are a lot of tree motifs in this movie.

So it was Jessie first, and everyone falling into place around her?

Agnes is the heart of the story, and so it seemed sensible to start there. We built out from there to Will and from there, the wider family, all the while doing this massive search for the kids. The other thing we left until further down the line were the people at the Globe—both the actors on stage, who you don’t actually see much of as one might have done, and the people in the audience.

What went into casting the extras in the Globe audience?

It was just studying people who would feel authentic, who might feel like they looked like they could belong there, basically. Because they’re not actors, they’re background artists, and to their credit, they really invested themselves in this process. We have this incredible woman who does this dream work, being able to delve into their memory and feelings, and they all really went for it and were fully invested in that scene, with real emotion and feeling, in a way that’s really unusual in that situation.

Even though it’s short, were the actors you found for the production of Hamlet at the end Shakespearean actors?

We were just looking for a great actors, it wasn’t really about how much Shakespeare they had or hadn’t done. Even though they weren’t very big parts, we were looking for really good actors who would also, again, feel less polished than a modern-looking actor.

Featured image: Jessie Buckley stars as Agnes and Joe Alwyn as Bartholomew in director Chloé Zhao’s HAMNET, a Focus Features release.
Credit: Agata Grzybowska / © 2025 FOCUS FEATURES LLC