And yet, as Hamnet’s production designer Fiona Crombie tells Condé Nast Traveler, finding substitute locations wasn’t as tricky as you might think. A costume and production designer for many British historical pieces—Crombie was Oscar-nominated for her work in The Favourite—she has lived in the UK for more than a decade and was unfazed by the challenge. Here, she shares her most memorable locations in Hamnet.
Brilley, Herefordshire, Welsh Borders
We join the story from Anne Hathaway’s perspective. Also known as “Agnes” she was to become Shakespeare’s wife and mother to his three children: eldest Susanna, and twins Judith and Hamnet. Hamnet died age 11 of the bubonic plague, and O’Farrell’s book explores the theory that Shakespeare’s most famous play Hamlet was shaped by his son’s death. O’Farrell also casts Agnes as a herbal healer who grew up on a farm with deep emotional ties to nature and the forest.
Agnes’ genuine home, “Hewlands” farm on the fringes of Stratford-upon-Avon, is now a tourist attraction (Anne Hathaway’s Cottage), so the team instead shot at Cwmmau in Herefordshire, a medieval farmhouse that is available for holiday rentals via the National Trust. “Our location manager was driving to a historic house that she’d heard had good potential, but those people didn’t answer the door,” says Crombie. “So, she carried on going and came across this listed farmhouse, which had never been on camera before. It was an amazing find. It’s got the perfect frontage, but because it’s a rental, it’d been renovated inside. We actually had to [temporarily] reverse all those modernizations before filming began.”
