20 Recent Movie Scenes NOBODY Saw Coming
6. Reaching Out To Hamlet - Hamnet
Even if you'd read Maggie O'Farrell's novel Hamnet before watching Chloé Zhao's Oscar-winning adaptation, you wouldn't have seen the movie's moving final gut-punch coming, because it wasn't in the source material at all.
Hamnet's grand emotional climax sees Agnes (an Oscar-winning Jessie Buckley) attend the first performance of Hamlet at the Globe Theatre, and when the actor playing Hamlet (Noah Jupe) performs his death scene, Agnes reaches out to him, before being joined by the surrounding audience in doing the same.
It's a moment that leaves few dry eyes in the house, cementing the power for art to help any one of us work through trauma.
But this beat wasn't in O'Farrell's novel nor Zhao's script. Rather, it was cooked up by Buckley and the crowd of extras while they were shooting it.
An astonishing outcome considering it's basically the emotional spine of the entire scene, but also proof of what brilliance can happen when filmmakers are open to new ideas on the fly.