Mercifully, after Kenneth Branagh's four-hour epic, the film's director, Michael Almereyda, cut the play to an hour and a half ("I don't know if this is sacrilege or whatever," offers Hawke, "but I believe that if Shakespeare were alive today, he would make some cuts") and drew from his principal a performance that hovers between the understated and the sulky. This is a more modest film, featuring Kyle MacLachlan as Claudius, Sam Shepard as the ghost and Bill Murray as a mighty uncomfortable-looking Polonius, who delivers his lines with the regret of an actor who knows they won't get the laughs he's accustomed to.
The shock of seeing Hollywood do Hamlet was absorbed 10 years ago, when Franco Zeffirelli cast Mel Gibson as the prince in a production that gave us Glenn Close gnashing her teeth as Gertrude, and Helena Bonham Carter as a cadaverous Ophelia. There is some clever visual trickery - security cameras, camcorders, televisions, to engineer the layered effect of Shakespeare's play within the play - and it's a fun adaptation. They inhabit the Elsinore Hotel, a Trump Tower-type complex the size of a small Scandinavian country. Set in modern-day Manhattan, it has Claudius as the CEO of a multinational company, the Denmark Corporation, Hamlet as a petulant young film-maker and Gertrude as a champagne-swilling lush. They have a baby daughter, Maya Ray Thurman-Hawke.)Īt 30, Hawke is the lead in a new film version of Hamlet. "I'll read an article about how Bob Dylan manipulated his image, put on these false personas, pretended he was like Woody Guthrie, and I think, what's the obligation in an interview to play into some mystique? But if you do, I think you end up dead." (Worthiness like this pays off: while Dillon and Slater dropped out of the race years ago, Hawke married Uma Thurman. "I sometimes think I'm so boring," he sighs winsomely. Then he gives a little Ethan smile, shrugs his Ethan shoulders and is suddenly recognisable as the orb of my 12th year. He looks like a student who hasn't seen enough daylight. There's still a grunge thing going on, with his long hair and dark layers of clothing. In the late afternoon sun he looks quite drab, dwarfed by the suite's grand furnishings and fiddling compulsively with the boots.
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