Since William Shakespeare’s Hamlet is arguably the most famous tragedy in literature, it’s not necessarily a surprise to find another iteration of it among the 2026 movie releases… until you take a closer look. The latest iteration of the iconic play is given a fresh spin thanks to Riz Ahmed’s longtime dream to tell his own version of it. told from a modern, South Asian point of view. CinemaBlend had the chance to speak to the movie’s director about telling Hamlet in a new context.
Hamlet follows a wealthy British South Asian man living in modern-day London, who’s dealing with the recent loss of his father. The movie features Shakespearean language and condenses the play into two hours. When I asked the director, Aneil Karia, about adapting the famed play with a new cultural context, he said this:
Well, in a way, the South Asian cultural specificity thing's interesting because of course, in many ways it just is what it is. Riz is South Asian, right? So, therefore Hamlet's South Asian, therefore his family's South Asian. And so, that almost just kind of wrote itself. It wasn't a decision in a strange way, but of course it affected many, many things about the story. We didn't want it to be at the forefront of everything… but it was kind of endlessly surprising and interesting what that cultural specificity brought to it.
Karia was approached by Riz Ahmed about six months after their collaboration on the Oscar-winning short The Long Goodbye. He said his first reaction to the project was thinking he’s “not the guy for this” due to his lack of connection to Shakespeare and the material. However, once he read the script Ahmed worked on with screenwriter Michael Lesslie (2015’s Macbeth, The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes and Now You See Me Now You Don’t) he started to become “excited” by it. As he continued:
There's a lot of elements about the play that from a modern lens can feel quite archaic and kind of whimsical. When you think about spirits appearing, family honor, someone not being allowed to marry this family or that family – things which feel antiquated, but actually in the South Asian context are still kind of contemporary parts of the conversation or parts of the culture.
This version of Hamlet certainly finds a unique and timely way to retell Shakespeare’s play despite it being over 400 years at this point. It’s told more like a thriller and involves a lavish dance sequence at a wedding, Riz Ahmed monologuing in a speeding sports car, and violent death sequences (of course). Karia also said this:
It did bring this kind of interesting transcendental kind of beauty to it. If you think about the opening of the film with the rituals, with the body preparation before that cremation for instance, these were just natural elements that we weren't kind of forcing into the story that did bring their own kind of spiritual kind of vibrancy and depth, which just kind of seemed to be nicely in conversation with this quite transcendent story, I suppose.
Along with Ahmed leading the cast, the movie also stars The Lord of the Rings: The Rings Of Power’s Morfydd Clark, Joe Alwyn and Timothy Spall. It’s earned a fresh 73% on Rotten Tomatoes.
Reimagining Hamlet was on Riz Ahmed’s mind since he was a teenager, but it took being two decades into his career before he was able to make it. The Brit has a huge resume of great movies, including earning a Best Actor Oscar nomination for 2019’s The Sound of Metal. As of late, he’s been busy, between recently hosting the new series Saturday Night Live UK and portraying Severus Snape in Audible’s Harry Potter audiobooks.
You can see his version of Hamlet in theaters now.
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