In Hamnet, costume designer Malgosia Turzanska didn’t treat the clothing as finished costumes. Instead, she built garments that could shift, deteriorate and evolve alongside the characters wearing them.
Directed by Chloé Zhao, Hamnet follows Agnes (Jessie Buckley), a healer living in rural England, and her husband Will Shakespeare (Paul Mescal), as they deal with the death of their son. It’s a film about grief, memory and artistic creation, and traces how tragedy shaped Shakespeare’s real-life writing of Hamlet. Turzanska’s costumes play a quiet but critical role in grounding that emotional journey, and show how the characters change over time.
Turzanska chose some of the materials for their instability: Agnes’ early bodice, for example, was constructed from bark cloth.
“It’s wood. It’s actually wood fiber,” says Turzanska, who is Oscar nominated for her Hamnet costumes. “And because she’s a very physical actress, it would breathe and live with her, and gradually kind of come apart.”
While the physical breakdown may have been symbolic, it also required constant maintenance during filming. “We had to mend as we went to keep the wood fibers in their place,” Turzanska explains.
Hamnet Costume Designer Malgosia Turzanska on a New Approach to Period Films
Turzanska’s approach differed from traditional period films, as she began with different textures and abstract elements, including plant-based fibers. The materials helped connect Agnes to her natural surroundings.
Rather than fabricate new costumes for each stage of the story, Turzanska stayed true to history and relied on a modular system drawn from Elizabethan clothing practices. There were subtle changes like swapped sleeves or bodices, depending on the scene. But overall, the clothes contain elements a casual viewer may miss.
“What was really awesome during the Elizabethan period was that the clothing was so modular, so you could switch out sleeves,” Turzanska explains. “You barely notice it, because it’s just one element. So it seems like Agnes is wearing one dress for half the film, but it’s actually not one dress. It is gradually shifting.”
That same approach shaped Will’s costumes, which reflect his emotional withdrawal as the story progresses. “When we see him first, he’s in the sort of greenish bluish grays, and then goes less and less saturated, more into gray scale,” Turzanska says. “He is adding sleeves and building more of a shell.”
Environmental conditions during filming created additional technical challenges. One leather doublet, treated with a crackle medium to create texture, required frequent repairs because the weather affected its surface.
“On the days where it rained really hard, it started coming off,” the designer says. “All the crew had little paint brushes and little jars of gray paint, and we would fix it as we went.”
Filming the Globe Theatre scenes presented another unexpected complication.
“There was just blue water dripping onto everything,” Turzanska says, describing how heavy rain caused painted surfaces on set to bleed onto costumes. “We just bought every single towel that was available, and we had the whole crew constantly wiping blue paint off the costumes.”
To highlight the film’s performances within the performance, Turzanska knew she had to differentiate the costumes. However, she didn’t want to treat the Globe actors’ costumes too differently from those of the patrons, as performers of the time wore clothing similar to that of their audiences. So she kept the Elizabethan shapes and built costumes out of raw linen, then painted them with latex paint.
“It put the performances somewhere between then and now,” she says.
That restraint and creativity were a through-line of the overall costuming, which Turzanska kept as simple as possible to avoid falling into the trap of glamorizing the period or adding unnecessary detail that would distract from the story. “The emotional message of the movie is very, very simple,” she says.
Even the a crucial costume that appears toward the end of Hamnet was minimalist, as Turzanska knew it had to ring true.
“I hope the story and costumes keep giving this emotional punch to people,” Turzanska says. “Essentially, yes, Hamnet is a movie about grief. But it is a movie about the healing power of community and art.”
Main image: Jessie Buckley as Agnes and Paul Mescal as William Shakespeare in Hamnet. Photo by Agata Grzybowska / © 2025 FOCUS FEATURES LLC
