Even though his run of films has been occasionally iffy – for every Milk, there’s a Girl Next Door – one thing has remained constant in Emile Hirsch’s career to date: he’s been hailed as one of the best young actors around.
Well, now he’s getting a chance to truly display his chops, for he’s signed on to play Hamlet, in a contemporised American version to be directed by Twilight’s Catherine Hardwicke.
Hardwicke, of course, specialises in movies about tortured youths, and they don’t come much more tortured or youthful than Shakespeare’s Danish prince who, over the course of the legendary play, experiences events – mostly involving death, betrayal and supernatural visions – that make him go quite doolally. And we’re not just talking the type of doolally that can be solved with a quick trip to The Priory. So this should be right up Hardwicke’s street.
And, the bright and bouncy Speed Racer aside, Hirsch has specialised in picking challenging projects that see him assay tortured youths, from Sean Penn’s Into The Wild to Ang Lee’s upcoming Taking Woodstock, in which he plays a Vietnam Vet who’s got several marbles rolling around upstairs. So it’ll be interesting to see what his age-appropriate take on Hamlet will be like.
Producers Dan Jinks and Bruce Cohen credited Hirsch with the idea of updating the story and moving it to America. Which is a bit of a shame as, unless Hardwicke pulls a Baz Luhrmann and keeps the original text in a modern setting, we’d like to have heard what Hirsch could have done with the famous ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy. Ah well… as Arnie says in Last Action Hero, ‘not to be’.
It won’t be the first time that The Bard has been updated for the big screen – Josh Hartnett took time out from being beaten at pool by our very own Sam Toy to star in Tim Blake Nelson’s O a few years back, while Ethan Hawke also starred in Hamlet a few years back. That, though, was generally poorly-received. And of course last week it was announced that David Tennant is bringing his acclaimed Hamlet to the small screen for the BBC.
Ron Nyswaner is currently working on a script, which will be completed within months. Then the production will really swing into action.