When Emily Watson describes her role playing William Shakespeare’s mum in Hamnet as ‘a full-circle moment’, she is not speaking lightly. The film, adapted from Maggie O’Farrell’s bestselling novel about the Shakespeare family during a bubonic plague, has already earnt six Golden Globe nominations, making it the buzziest bard-themed film since Shakespeare In Love hoovered up seven Oscars in 1999. It has reduced audience members – including me – to whimpering, sobbing wrecks in early screenings. Even hardened critics have admitted to crying at the scene in which – well, I don’t want to spoil it for you. But it’s hardly surprising Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal are both hotly tipped for Oscar nominations.
But it’s Watson, 58, who has the most personal connection to Britain’s national writer. ‘I first went to the RSC when I was seven – we did that a lot growing up,’ she says. ‘My mum was a real Shakespearean. She read Shakespeare pretty much every day of her life.’
This wasn’t just a middle-class parent giving her child a cultural leg-up. Watson’s parents were members of the School of Economic Science (SES), a conservative, Hindu-based sect in which Shakespeare was one of the few writers permitted. ‘There was Shakespeare, the Bible and various spiritual texts,’ she says.
Cardigan, Vince, The Outnet
And so Watson clung on to Shakespeare with both hands. Her first professional acting job was at the RSC. It’s where she also met her husband of 30 years, actor Jack Waters, who is from Stratford-upon-Avon. And one of their two children is called Juliet. You can see why Hamnet, a domestic tragedy centred around Shakespeare’s son Hamnet, was ‘a pretty amazing thing to be a part of’, as she says. ‘It felt like there were spells and magic happening.’
We’re talking over tea in the Covent Garden Hotel, London. I had found Watson in a quiet corner, elegant in a dark brown Jigsaw dress. (‘It’s my go-to place for old-lady clothes.’) At first she seems guarded, even shy – she was taught to be suspicious of the world, she explains, to keep her borders closed. But she has a quick, dry humour, too, and clearly lots of worldly wisdom.
You can see why, when Buckley was put on the Bafta Breakthrough programme in 2017, she chose Watson to be her mentor. And you can see why the pair have remained close friends since.
Coat, Zimmermann, The Outnet. Dress, Rabanne, Fenwick. Boots, Mafalda
Buckley recently described Watson as ‘a lighthouse of a friend and a woman’ – and persuaded the director of Hamnet, Chloé Zhao, to cast Watson in the role.
Watson was unsure at first – she loved O’Farrell’s novel and wondered if its rich prose could possibly be translated to the screen. But she says Zhao, whose Nomadland won Best Director and Best Picture Oscars in 2021, managed to tap into the book’s singular magic. ‘She’s right up there with any director I’ve worked with. She’s a witch! She has magic in her!’ Rather unusually, each day’s shoot would begin with games, rituals and what Watson describes as ‘spells’, and often ended with ceremonial dancing to ensure everyone felt ‘connected’.
There are two scenes that demanded pretty much everything from Buckley – a birth scene and a death scene – and Watson’s character Mary is present for both. ‘[Jessie] doesn’t need any advice from me because she’s amazing,’ says Watson. ‘But I know that having someone there who knows how much it costs [to perform in those scenes] really helps.’
Emily with Paul Mescal, Jessie Buckley and Chloé Zhao at the premiere of Hamnet
Watson certainly knows what it costs to give it her all on camera. Her film debut, as Bess in Lars von Trier’s Breaking The Waves (1996) – as a woman whose sexual devotion to her paralysed husband becomes a kind of spiritual martyrdom – remains one of the most extraordinary in cinema. Helena Bonham Carter turned it down for being too explicit – yet it earned Watson an Oscar nomination, the full glare of Hollywood and, in time, a career working with directors including Paul Thomas Anderson (Punch-Drunk Love) and Steven Spielberg (War Horse).
Watson’s unusual upbringing was compounded by being sent to St James, an independent SES school in West London, which remains open, where she has said she witnessed ‘incidents of extreme cruelty’. School ‘wasn’t great, to be honest!’ she says now. ‘The aim of it was a spiritual life – but it was strict and harsh. Young women were told there was no sex before marriage.’
The rigid conservative values didn’t sit easily with the usual teenage feelings. ‘The idea was that you tried to attain a state of spiritual detachment from the world. When you’re 13, you’re like, “F**k off!”’ Still, Watson pushes back against the idea her parents were villains. And it is hard to square her mum’s devotion to the empathetic Shakespeare with such a rigid mindset. Watson smiles. ‘There were a lot of contradictions.’
1996: Lars von Trier’s Breaking The Waves
Watson was expelled from SES after the nudity and general depravity of Breaking The Waves catapulted her to global fame, though she says she had by then decided it was ‘bulls**t’ and was pretty much ready to walk anyway. ‘I had somewhere to go where I felt alive. I wasn’t just running away. I was going towards something.’
She later repaired her relationship with her parents, and they remained on good terms until their deaths (her mother died in 2011 and her father in 2015). Her feelings about the ‘spiritual communism’ of SES remain ambivalent. ‘You don’t suddenly throw it off. It takes ages. I’m still working it out now.’
Indeed, she tells me she has recurring dreams in which she is pursued by lions, which she sees as a strange echo of her upbringing. ‘I’m dreaming away and suddenly I’m like, “Oh damn, the lions are here!”’ What does she think the lions represent? ‘That feeling of being found out? I actually don’t know.’
1999: Angela’s Ashes, with Robert Carlyle
Nevertheless, she also feels her ‘devotional nature’ helped her as an actor. ‘Guilt and fear are always easily available to me,’ she says.
She is certainly devoted to her Hamnet co-stars. She speaks of Buckley with evident affection (‘this is a part Jessie was born to play’) and describes how the pair had already bonded while working together on the 2019 HBO series Chernobyl. ‘We found we had a very aligned sensibility in the way we think about work and… lots of things!’
She’s also admiring of Paul Mescal. ‘To be able to come in and just play William Shakespeare, with all the baggage that comes with that, is so impressive. He’s really smart and diligent. He cares about the good stuff.’ It’s not the first time she has played his mother, either – the pair worked together on the Irish fishing drama God’s Creatures (2022). That was after Mescal was in Normal People but before he was in Gladiator II, and Watson is impressed by the way he has remained grounded. ‘It’s all happening to him – but he’s got a pretty good head.’
2001: Robert Altman’s Gosford Park
Like Buckley and Mescal, Watson – who received two Best Actress Oscar nominations in two years for Breaking The Waves and Hilary And Jackie (the 1998 film in which she played cellist Jacqueline du Pré) – has had lots of roles thrown at her. But she opted for a career of carefully chosen artistic projects, as opposed to chasing Hollywood money. ‘I just kind of knew that my currency would be work that had creative integrity somehow. It was an instinctive thing.’
She hasn’t always made the right calls. In 1998 she turned down playing Elizabeth I. The role went to Cate Blanchett. And she was offered Amélie (the character was apparently called Amélie after her – it’s a French version of Emily), but Watson didn’t think her French would be up to it. ‘I never had a master plan,’ she says. ‘My husband describes casting as a taxi rank. When you get to the front, you take the taxi that’s there. You might like another one better but, unless you’re Leonardo DiCaprio, you don’t get to be that choosy.’
2011: Steven Spielberg’s War Horse
Still, she has earnt the right to be a bit selective, and there are more rewarding roles for 50-something actresses than there have ever been, she says. ‘I don’t think that’s just borne out of a particular political moment. It’s a shift in the nature of the audience.’
Nor does she feel too much pressure to look a particular way. ‘I felt a little bit of that pressure when I was in Hollywood. But I’ve always been more of a character actor.’
She tries to keep herself ‘in good nick’, mostly for the sake of her children Juliet and Dylan, now 20 and 16. ‘And it’s so much better for your head as an actor.’
Marriage to another actor brings its own challenges. ‘It’s the most rewarding thing and the hardest thing. Work-life balance is brutal. But we’re still cracking away at it.’ Waters’ own career simply didn’t take off in the same way as hers, and he is now more devoted to ceramics than acting. But, she says, ‘As the kids get older, it does get easier.’
2019: Chernobyl, co-starring Jessie Buckley
Their favourite thing to do as a couple is simply walking. ‘We go walking a lot – the companionship of walking together, I love that. Being contemplative in nature.’ Lest I think she’s incredibly serious, she adds, ‘I also love going to the pub!’
Still, she does have a slightly funny idea of a good time. I’m keen to discover a lighter, sillier side to Watson, and I ask what brings her joy. ‘Joy? Joy is hard to come by.’ I ask if she watched The Celebrity Traitors and she says she did – but only as a way of coming down after reading a particularly harrowing article in The Guardian, detailing the names and ages of every known child killed in the Israeli bombardment of Gaza. ‘After I started reading it, I thought, “I can’t walk away from reading this. I have to go through with it.”’ The list ran to 18,457 names and it took her more than four hours. ‘I felt like such a shitty person at the end, because I kept thinking, “When is this going to end?” But that made me more determined to read on.’
It was only after these four hours that she allowed herself to watch Traitors. Perhaps that’s what she means about the guilt from her childhood staying with her.
2025: Hamnet, playing Shakespeare’s mum
Nevertheless, she speaks of her parents with gentleness and wisdom. ‘I never really fell out with them,’ she says. ‘It was uncomfortable for a while, but we were fully reconciled. It’s one of those confusing things in life. But the older I get, the more I realise it’s OK to be confused about lots of things.’
Hamnet is in cinemas from Friday
Hair: Narad Kutowaroo at Carol Hayes using Unite Hair.
Make-up: Justine Jenkins using Inika Organic.
