Oscar-Nominated “Hamnet” Production Designer Fiona Crombie on Re-Inventing Shakespeare’s Home & the Globe Theater

Hamnet may or may not win this year’s Best Picture Oscar, but either way, the eight-time nominee is widely regarded as the most emotionally devastating film of 2025. Best Actress frontrunner Jessie Buckley delivers a gut-wrenching performance as William Shakespeare’s wife Agnes, who’s forced to cope with the death of their 11-year-old son Hamnet (the extraordinary Jacobi Jupe). Will (Paul Mescal), meanwhile, draws on the loss to write one of the greatest works in history, “Hamlet.” Directed and co-written by Chloé Zhao (sharing screenplay credit with Maggie O’Farrell, who helped adapt her own novel), the film situates its fact-based story within a finely detailed re-creation of 16th-century Tudor architecture from Oscar-nominated production designer Fiona Crombie and set decorator Alice Felton.

Crombie, whose credits include Cruella and The Favourite, had never worked with Zhao before, but won over the director with a portfolio of images she’d curated for their first meeting. “When I put together my PDF [document], I found myself overcome with emotion, just looking at this series of images that mapped out the visual narrative. For me, it wasn’t about loss or fear or grief. It was about honoring the things that make us tick and trying to bring a sense of everyday life into this Elizabethan story.”

Speaking from a hotel in Prague, where she’s working on a new project, Crombie explains how she re-imagined Shakespeare’s house and trashed the floor of the “Globe Theatre” with apple cores to evoke the spirit—if not the precise dimensions—of the world inhabited by Agnes and her family.

Audiences almost invariably talk about Hamnet in terms of its intense emotional impact. What was your gut reaction the first time you read the script?

I couldn’t get through it without weeping. When I first started making movies 16 years ago, I was drawn to dark material, but at some point, I decided I didn’t want to do it anymore. I want love or lightness. I want laughter. Maybe 10 years ago, this film would not have struck me the way that it struck me at this point in my life.

At this point in your life, do you have kids now?

Yes, I have two children. I felt a big responsibility with this film to illustrate family life in all its ordinary shapes. Being a parent, being a partner, and running a house is epic. Just looking at my life and my family, this film is a love letter to that more than anything.

Many movies have featured grand estates built by wealthy English aristocrats in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. By contrast, William Shakespeare grew up in a typical Tudor-era house and lived there with his wife, Agnes, to raise their kids, right?

Yeah. It had once been quite a nice house, but now it was falling apart and was centuries old by the time Will’s family lived there.

Shakespeare’s original “Henley Street House” still exists as a popular tourist attraction in England. How did you address that reality?

The intention was to work on location, but that turned out to be unviable, so we had to build the house on the backlot of Elstree Studios.

What kind of research did you do?

I had never actually been to Henley Street House before, so I went there and took the walk around with all the other tourists, listening in to the [tour] guides. I really just tried to pay attention to things having to do with the materials and the proportions, like the scale of these massive fireplaces, the height of the low ceilings, and the little winding staircases.

You say “pay attention,” but did you take photographs and measure the rooms to make sure your version was an accurate replication?

No, I didn’t do that because, to be honest, we didn’t really replicate anything. What we really wanted to do was to address the atmosphere. We wanted the layout of the rooms to work for the camera, so I worked closely with [cinematographer] Lukasz Zal in plotting out the house. Our footprint is quite different from the real Henley Street house. 

Wood plays a starring role in the architecture of this period. Where did you source all that beautifully aged timber?

We shipped about 20 tons of oak beams from France, where a couple of barns had been dismantled. Those oak beams were spread amongst the three sets that we built on the backlot – the Henley Street house, the attic [in London where Shakespeare later lived], and the Globe Theatre. But we were also working with incredible plasterers who could turn anything into looking like it’s a beam, and painters came in to grain it. At the Henley Street house, the floor looks like stone, but it’s not stone. There’s a lot of hand-painted scenic art detailing. 

How does your version of the original Globe Theatre, which burned down in 1613, compare to the original?

From an exterior point of view, it’s pretty accurate, but our Globe [interior] is 70 percent the size of the real one. We brought it down to give a more intimate relationship between the audience and the players. Chloé asked me to make it look like the inside of a tree, so that was my brief. In terms of the balconies and where the audience was standing, the stage itself is pretty accurate. The backstage area we did just for our story so that Will could stand on the side and look out at Agnes. Like, it feels accurate.

I’m talking to you from Los Angeles, home to this improv troupe called “The Groundlings,” named after the peasants who bought cheap tickets at the Globe and stood on the ground to watch the plays. Can you talk about how you treated the floor of the Globe where the groundlings would hang out?

The floor was known for having lots of broken nuts and apple cores, rubbish that the audience just threw on the ground. I remember eating apples and throwing them down for texture. Now I look back and think, “Why did we go to the trouble?” because that floor was always going to be covered by hundreds of people. I guess there’s one shot from behind where you see everybody streaming into the theatre. But then it flooded.

What?! The actual set?

It’s an outdoor set, it’s England, it rains. I came to work one morning, and there was easily 40 centimeters [15 inches] of water, so all the apple seeds, all my textures and details were sprinkled everywhere, just floating. The SFX team had to come in and pump it all out.

Will Shakespeare’s apartment in London is described in the script simply as “Four tall walls, small windows, stone ground, one singular tree in the middle, a dot of green in a world of gray.” What did you make of that description?

I think that Chloé ‘s approach to London is very clever in that the conventional beat would be to show [a wide shot] like, “Look, we’ve arrived in this vast city.” But Chloé did the opposite. We put in high walls, so the aperture changed. Suddenly, Agnes couldn’t see the sky. We spoke about Agnes feeling hemmed in by that [high wall]. It’s the opposite of “London’s bustling with people.” We’re closing her in. There’s only one tree. The texture changed, the palette changed, and Agnes’ relationship to the sky and nature changed. 

Chloé Zhao assembled a stellar team to make this picture. From your vantage point, how does she manage to get all the Talent on the same page?

Chloé invites everybody to bring their impulses and instincts to the film. Then she works out the most articulate way of saying what she needs to say and brings all of us to that place. Any time there was a moment where there could have been a flourish or somebody embellishing something—no! We go to the essential. She’s succinct but not cold.

That tight focus probably intensifies the visceral power of Jessie Buckley’s and the rest of the cast’s performances.

As a production designer, my job is to make the most authentic world for the actors so they can make authentic choices in their performances. Nothing artificial, at all. That was our challenge.

Featured image: Jessie Buckley stars as Agnes in director Chloé Zhao’s HAMNET, a Focus Features release. Credit: Courtesy of Focus Features / © 2025 FOCUS FEATURES LLC