Focus FeaturesA good Shakespearean play is a lot like a good rap song, it’s been said. Not by many people, surely — but certainly by Riz Ahmed, the actor, rapper, and Oscar-winning writer whose talents converge with his love for the Bard in a new take on Hamlet.“I actually think it’s one of the best metaphors we have to understand Shakespeare,” the Rogue One alum tells Inverse. “A big issue with how we understand Shakespeare and how we’re introduced to it is we sit down and read it.” But Shakespeare’s plays, like any play, are meant to be heard, to be experienced. We shouldn’t necessarily be poring over every aspect of the text, nor should we understand everything put to paper in our first go.It’s the same with music, Ahmed says: “When I listen to songs by some of my favorite rappers the first time through, I’m like, ‘I didn’t catch everything.’ [But] it doesn’t matter: I’m moved by it. I understand the energy, the intent, and the emotion … It’s much more fun to listen to rap music than read it.”By that logic, don’t go into Ahmed’s Hamlet expecting to understand everything that’s going down. Even a rudimentary understanding of Shakespeare’s most eternal play — a jaded prince thinks his uncle conspired to murder his dad and take over his kingdom, but can’t quite prove it yet — is more than enough to get by. In the immortal words of Christopher Nolan’s Tenet, it’s really better to feel Hamlet. And Ahmed, reuniting with director Aneil Karia, wants you to feel everything.This version of the play is the first mainstream remake we’ve gotten in 25 years. (The last, for anyone curious, was Ethan Hawke’s take on the Dane, in which he recites “To be or not to be?” in the aisles of a Blockbuster Video.) There’s a sense that we’re overdue for a good Hamlet adaptation in the way Ahmed and Karia attack the material, pumping scenes with gritty study of grief and punchy, neon-lit wraiths. This Hamlet is as much a crime thriller as it is a slice of the title prince’s still-beating heart, an ode to the outsiders in virtually every way. But under that punk, revisionist sensibility lies a true love for a story this enduring: It’s why this duo can turn Hamlet into what feels like one long rap music video and actually stick the landing.Karia and Ahmed took home the Oscar for Best Live Action Short Film in 2022. | Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic, Inc/Getty ImagesFor every theater kid who immediately connects with the text of Hamlet, there’s a neophyte holding Shakespeare at arm’s length. Ahmed, naturally, falls into the former: The actor first got lost in, then found by, the classic text in high school and immediately connected with the themes of isolation, grief, and wrath that absorbed its title character. Even now, 16 years after first encountering the text, he remains fascinated by its central question: Has the world gone crazy, or am I losing my mind?“That’s literally how everyone wakes up these days feeling, right?” Ahmed proposes. “That’s at the heart of the play.”Ahmed has wanted to adapt Hamlet for the big screen almost as long as he’s loved the play. He connected with Mike Lesslie, the screenwriter who’d go on to pen Justin Kurzel’s Macbeth, in university — but the pair spent years hammering away at their own script until Ahmed found the third piece of the puzzle: Karia, who identified as the Shakespeare agnostic.“I didn’t have that sacred relationship with it,” Karia tells Inverse of Shakespeare’s work. After studying it in school, he’d assumed the plays were more for the “slightly elite,” “stuffy” establishment — the complete opposite of his target audience. Having directed a handful of music videos for rappers like Kano, as well as the British thriller series Top Boy, Karia’s visceral style made him the perfect choice to direct The Long Goodbye, the Oscar-winning short that accompanied Ahmed’s 2020 album of the same name. Ahmed wanted his “radical” eye on Hamlet, too — but Karia hesitated.“After we made [The Long Goodbye] and Riz sent me Hamlet … I was like, ‘Oh, God, how could I possibly do that? I’m not that guy,’” he recalls.The Long Goodbye was a trippy stepping stone for the “transcendent space” Hamlet exists in. | Focus FeaturesIt was Ahmed who pointed out the similarities between The Long Goodbye, which ends with a sequence of spoken word in “this slightly transcendent space,” and the introspection rife in Hamlet. “He kind of helped me make peace with this idea of poetry woven into narrative filmmaking,” adds Karia. “He’s like, ‘You’ve done this already.’”Hamlet would see Karia translate that to a larger canvas, tempering Ahmed’s love for the play with the guts to trim some of the fat. “In the past few years, I’ve gone on a big journey with overhauling my relationship to Shakespeare,” Karia continues. Finding his way into Hamlet involved rooting himself in the “emotional and psychological” truth of the text: “Can we make this a felt experience? Can we make this visceral and lived in?”Additionally, could they strip the story of everything that Hamlet himself doesn’t directly experience? “It’s hard to make the three-and-a-half, four-hour version [of Hamlet],” the director admits. “And in this day and age, I’m not sure people want to watch that, either.” (If they do, there’s always Kenneth Branagh’s four-hour behemoth of a remake.) “I was like, ‘What if we stripped all that away? How about we strip these people away so that he’s actually quite isolated, actually quite alone and unraveling?’”This Hamlet trims a lot of its text, but it offsets that leanness with a fresh perspective. | Focus FeaturesNarrowing the scope of Hamlet to its hero’s perspective became the key to unlocking the true potential of this adaptation. It lent “a lot of interesting ambiguity” to the play’s metaphysical elements, like when Hamlet comes face-to-face with the ghost of his father on the windswept roof of a high-rise.“Suddenly his mental health and his reality are in question right from the get-go,” Karia says. “All these decisions seem to make things more ambiguous, and the truth murkier.”It also makes this story more accessible for a modern audience, one further removed from the Bard’s era than any before. “The reason why people keep coming back to this story and this character is because he is feeling something that is evergreen, for better or worse,” Ahmed adds. Not everyone can relate to Hamlet’s dogged quest to avenge his father’s murder, or uncover the conspiracy within at his uncle’s wedding to his mother — a sequence that, thanks to an ethereal group of wedding dancers, is a highlight of this Hamlet. But so many have been forced to reckon with a reality that they no longer recognize, and the bitterness and bewilderment that come from that realization.“It’s that feeling,” Ahmed explains, “that is the central question of the play [and] is the most relatable.”Hamlet, alongside Bait, falls into Ahmed’s quest to “stretch culture.” | Simon Ackerman/Getty Images Entertainment/Getty ImagesThat feeling also makes it all that much easier to quiet the superficial scrutiny surrounding Ahmed’s Hamlet. The actor has been fielding questions about his choice to recenter this story on a South Asian, British family since the film premiered at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival, and it’s a conversation that’s bled into the discourse surrounding his James Bond farce Bait.In the latter, Ahmed plays a kind of parallel version of himself, a struggling actor whose life changes overnight when he’s named as a hopeful to play the next Bond. It defies neat categorization, as does Hamlet — but both are the kinds of stories Ahmed wants to continue telling.“I’m a big advocate of both stepping into the mold and creating a new mold,” Ahmed says. “What I really like about what Aneil has done with Hamlet and what the whole team managed to do with Bait is that we’re exploding and complicating preexisting archetypes such as Hamlet or James Bond — but we are also putting worlds and specificity and experiences on screen that haven’t been depicted that much … I think that’s how you stretch culture, and I think that’s the point of storytelling.”Hamlet opens in theaters on April 10.