Hamlet’s Aneil Karia on Turning Shakespeare Into a Riz Ahmed Thriller Movie | Interview
ComingSoon’s Tyler Treese spoke with Hamlet director Aneil Karia about his bold new take on the Shakespeare play. The Oscar winner spoke about making changes to the classic work, working with Riz Ahmed on the iconic “to be or not to be” speech, and more. Vertical will release Hamlet in theaters on April 10, 2026.
“Shakespeare’s most enduring tragedy is reimagined in a bold, modern adaptation set within London’s elite South Asian community. When Hamlet (Riz Ahmed) returns for his father’s funeral, he is stunned to discover his uncle Claudius is marrying his newly widowed mother. Visited by his father’s ghost, Hamlet learns his brutal murder was at the hands of Claudius – and spirals into a quest for vengeance that exposes the rot at the heart of the family’s empire and threatens his own sanity,” says the official synopsis.
Tyler Treese: Shakespeare is often treated as a sacred text, so I feel like it takes bravery to make changes and to have a Hamlet doing coke in a nightclub. Can you speak to your approach of reinterpretation and not being afraid to make some bold choices in the adaptation of such a well-known work?
Aneil Karia: Yeah, I think you’re right. It’s obviously got this very, very sacred and revered kind of aura around it. Any Shakespeare text, so it is intimidating, and I was kind of suitably intimidated. I think what helped and made it slightly less daunting was having the incredible screenwriter, Michael Lesslie, whose mind is quite a kind of a special place when it comes to Shakespeare. He really has a deep and comprehensive understanding of it. He’s also adapted Macbeth, the Justin Kurzel film that Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard are in. He has an amazing mind where you can fire these ideas at him and he can kind of quite quickly process the kind of wins you’ll get, but also the kind of dangers of what it might bring two acts later or whatever.
But I think ultimately to answer your question, I think it’s what you have to really do with Shakespeare. I think it’s there to be reimagined in different ways. We all know we’ve seen this play adapted before countless times, whether it’s on stage or film. If you’re gonna do it again, I think you need to be bringing your approach to it and doing it through a particular lens, you know?
Our lens was can we strip it all back and make it this lean kind of more propulsive story where we’re really rooted in Hamlet’s perspective, where we’re kind of on his shoulder kind of unraveling with him and where we go on this kind of more visceral psychological journey and kind of prioritize the emotional experience rather than a kind of an intellectual one. And yeah, practically speaking, what we did was we stripped a lot of the scenes away that don’t have him in, and so we’re kind of always with him. It’s this kind of first-person approach, I suppose.
This film really moves along, and pacing-wise, it feels like a modern thriller. What made you want to set it in modern-day London and have this very modern pace to the film, but also have them speaking Shakespearean English?
Aneil Karia: Yeah, well, I think when you strip Hamlet to its kind of core, it is this quite timeless story. Here’s a guy who’s kind of entwined in these kinds of corrupt, quite grotesque systems, and he’s kind of horrified by them, but he’s also kind of part of them. He’s at once like ashamed and complicit, which feels like a very timeless duality to be experiencing. It feels like politically, when you think about the world right now, it feels like where a lot of us are at.
So I think it felt like it was speaking to something quite contemporary, but also I think creatively, a lot of our conditioning to Shakespeare is kind of that it’s an intellectual experience that we kind of sit in the theater and an arm’s length from and we watch this kind of quite cerebral kind of process unfold, and we analyze the kind of beautiful complex prose and the kind of like clever plots and things like that, and that it’s kind of cerebral first and emotional second.
So, it felt interesting to approach it the other way round and come at it from this kind of connected, propulsive, naturalism kind of language. But then the most exciting version was to keep the language. Because that’s what’s so beautiful and that’s what’s at the heart of it, but find a different and fresh way into it rather than abandoning it all, which felt kind of slightly pointless, but I think that the challenge for us was, “Can we retain this language but find a new way of performing it, capturing it, filming it and kind of harnessing it that makes it feel somehow rooted in the every day, the kind of lived in the conversational somehow almost?”
I love how you shot the “to be or not to be” section, driving dangerously down the road. How was it shooting that scene? Because it’s one take, it’s really intense. I love that scene in Hamlet.
Oh, thanks, Tyler. Appreciate it. Yeah, yeah, I mean, that was definitely one of the big challenging set pieces. Weirdly, the most challenging thing about that was just the really mundane problem of finding enough road, actually. It’s probably easier in America, actually, with those amazing highways, but, you know, here to lock off on an indie budget to find whatever it is, three minutes of road that you can lock off at night safely and not have to drive about 20 miles per hour on was a massive challenge.
Actually, respect to the locations manager, Eugene Strange, who eventually found that. What happened was in the end, we could find a maximum of something like two minutes, 42 seconds of road if you’re traveling at 60 miles per hour. The speech was running longer than that, and I remember texting Riz and saying, “Right, so basically you’re gonna have to do to be or not to be in two minutes, 42 or under.” He, being Riz, just texts back, being like, “Okay, it is what it is. Let’s do it.” So it brought this kind of urgency. Every decision we made seemed to, however inadvertently, just bring more urgency and more kind of propulsion to each thing, which kind of felt fitting for that.
You and Riz are obviously great collaborators. You did The Long Goodbye before this. Why do you think you two worked so well together?
Aneil Karia: I mean, I’ve got such respect for him as an actor. What’s interesting with Riz is he’s like a fiercely intellectual guy. He is so smart, so well read, so well versed. So able to kind of speak so eloquently on any topic you give him, really, but actually, when it comes to filmmaking performance and things, I think he wants to strip all that away and come at things physically and kind of emotionally. I think he wants to kind of embody these roles and ultimately is kind of like an emotional human being. I think he wants to feel things, even if he has the intellectual capacities, kind of understand anything he wants. I think he ultimately, he wants people to feel, and I think that’s kind of the filmmaking approach I’ve always taken. So I think that’s probably where we connect.
Thanks to Aneil Karia for taking the time to talk about Hamlet.
Source: Comingsoon.net