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Reviving Ophelia: Inside the New Film That Gives Voice to Hamlet’s Tragic Heroine

A spoiler-filled conversation with director Claire McCarthy and screenwriter Semi Chellas.

July 2, 2019

Ophelia, a new take on Hamlet, is set in the 14th century; it premiered at Sundance in January 2018. Yet this Shakespeare-inspired film also has a chilling resonance with the past few months—particularly as lawmakers across the country have passed bills further restricting access to abortion.

Based on Lisa Klein’s 2006 Y.A. novel, Ophelia shifts the spotlight from Hamlet to his love interest; to Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude; and to Mechtild, a new character invented by Klein and expanded in the film.

“I wanted to take these characters who have been marginalized and move them central stage, sort of literally,” screenwriter Semi Chellas said in an interview. “I think there’s a huge appeal in that, because there’s a big hunger for stories we haven’t heard before, or angles that haven’t come up in stories from before. Many of those offstage characters become the determining players in this version.”

Mechtild, one of those key players, is an herbalist; in Klein’s book, Ophelia becomes her apprentice, during which she hones the expertise in flowers she displays in the original play. At one point Mechtild gives Ophelia a potion that “mimics death but mocks it”—enabling Ophelia to fake a suicide and survive beyond the “muddy death” that is her end in Shakespeare’s telling.

Chellas and the film’s director, Claire McCarthy, gave Mechtild a deeper backstory that weaves her fate more closely to the events of Hamlet.

“Do you know why they call me a witch?” Mechtild says to Daisy Ridley’s Ophelia. “At 19, I was with child by a man who swore he’d marry me. When my baby died inside me, rumors spread it was the Devil’s work. The righteous came to cast the Devil out.” Mobs pursued Mechtild, forcing her to retreat into the isolated home where Ophelia meets her. Though Mechtild probably knows herbs that can induce an abortion, it’s made clear that she did not intend for her child to die, and she mourns the loss of her son.

The expansion of Mechtild’s story line enabled the filmmakers to bring in “some kinds of flirtations with other Shakespearean undertones,” McCarthy said. “There’s a little bit of a nod to Macbeth’s witches, and there’s sort of Gothic foreboding.” The comparison to the Scottish play also evokes Lady Macbeth, whose dialogue suggests that she lost an infant child once as well.

Mechtild’s story particularly brings to mind the bill signed in Georgia in May. That bill stays vague on whether women could be prosecuted for termination of their pregnancies, leaving many horrified by the possibility that the bill will result in criminalization of women who endure the personal tragedy of a miscarriage or stillbirth.
Late in the film we learn (spoiler alert) that Mechtild is Gertrude’s sister (both characters are played by Naomi Watts), and the father of Mechtild’s dead child is Claudius (played by Clive Owen)—the man who later becomes Gertrude’s husband and Denmark’s king.

This addition may strike some as extra drama wedged into an already dramatic story. But the parallels between Mechtild and modern American women—now facing Roe v. Wade-challenging de facto abortion bans in states including Missouri and Alabama, as well as Georgia—pay off in the film’s powerful ending.

While Klein’s book keeps the play’s major events unchanged, McCarthy’s film makes striking alterations to the play’s final scene. Hamlet, played by George MacKay, does not kill his father’s murderer, Claudius. Instead Gertrude—reeling from the sight of her slain son and the new knowledge that it was Claudius who set the mobs on her sister—grabs Hamlet’s sword and stabs it deep into the chest of her stunned husband.

Mechtild gets her revenge too: mere seconds after Gertrude stabs Claudius, Mechtild bursts into the grand hall, leading the Norwegians who take control of Elsinore amid a bloodbath that leaves even more dead than the play’s high body count.

This climactic scene supplies the one moment when Watts’s two characters are onscreen together, a heartrending encounter between the two sisters. Chellas said her time working on the BBC America series Orphan Black (which earned Tatiana Maslany an Emmy for playing a variety of clones) inspired her to write the two roles to be played by one actress, and she knew from Watts’s dual performance in Mulholland Drive that she’d be up for the challenge.

Chellas pointed out that “in the end, our Hamlet really goes to his death with indecisiveness, not having been able to pull the trigger, and it’s left to the women to make the big decisions.” Seeing the film’s reimagined conclusion was striking to Klein: “My first thought was, This is a revenge movie for the #MeToo moment,” she said.

McCarthy and Chellas didn’t land on the film’s ultimate conclusion until a late pass on the film’s screenplay.

“We decided in a world in which women are not valued...they may not have the ability to rewrite their own world, rewrite their own story,” the director said. “They would use the tools that they already have in their hands, or they’ll use the tools of that world, and that world would bring them down.”

Indeed, Mechtild and Gertrude’s tragedy is compounded by Gertrude’s decision to drink the vial of poison she finds in Claudius’s possession just after killing him. (Which means that in the film, she dies the same way she does in Shakespeare’s play—but this time by her own choice.) Meanwhile Ophelia chooses to leave a world that values vengeance over justice, and over love. She gets a happy ending far away from Elsinore, where she tells her own story to her young daughter.
Shakespeare’s tragedies enable audiences to vicariously experience outsize events while working as cautionary tales—particularly against pursuing vengeance, a pursuit that leads to death, destruction, and, in the case of Titus Andronicus, twisted, pie-related ends.

Ophelia does something similar: it’s a gruesome and tragic, yet satisfying depiction of women taking vengeance for the wrongs done against them into their own hands. And in a nation where women have already been prosecuted for pregnancy loss, it’s a deeply cathartic viewing experience.

Emily Rome