Sympathy for the Dane: Hamlet Director Aneil Karia Talks Entering the Bard's World and Breaking Down the Mouse Trap
Karia breaks down making us feel bad for Shakespeare's fuckboi.
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There's a Hamlet for every generation. If you're asking a millennial, they'll point to Ethan Hawke giving the "To be or not to be" speech in a Blockbuster. Gen Xers had Kenneth Branagh's opulent mid-'90s interpretation. For director Aneil Karia, who tackles the Bard's indecisive Prince (as played by a fabulous Riz Ahmed), he had actually done something kind of impossible: he'd avoided most of the Hamlet adaptations.
"I didn't really have much of a relationship with that. That probably sounds sacrilegious," Karia tells The Film Maven. "I had the same kind of experience of Shakespeare as most people in this country which is that you have to study it at school, to some extent. Some people are lucky enough to have the intellect, or the teacher, or the experience where they break through with it and form of proper connection with it. Whereas I actually, like a lot of people, had a surface appreciation of it but felt like I wasn't quite intellectual, smart, whatever it is, enough to break through with it on a deeper level and probably left school thinking, 'Okay, well, it's cool, but I'm not one of those people. I'm not quite a Shakespeare person."
