Chloé Zhao Discusses Hamnet, Revitalizing Buffy, and Navigating Hollywood as a "Deeply Neurodivergent" Director | Vanity Fair

Seconds after director Chloé Zhao called cut on the final, wrenching scene of Hamnet, the beat dropped as Rihanna’s “We Found Love” filled an intricate reproduction of the Globe Theater near London. The stars went first—Paul Mescal onstage playing young “Will” Shakespeare, Jessie Buckley stunning in the front row as his wild-hearted wife, Agnes, and Joe Alwyn as her brother, Bartholomew—surrendering to dance. Then the cast and crew joined in, with hundreds of Renaissance-costumed extras jumping and shaking in Elizabethan ecstasy.

“Wigs were lost” as the troupe vibed together, Zhao remembers. “You get that from taking mushrooms, you get that from making love.” And yes, says the 43-year-old filmmaker, serene as a yoga teacher: “You get that from dancing.”

Zhao is curled on a cozy green couch in her midcentury hideaway tucked in a Los Angeles cul-de-sac teeming with giant succulents. Her face and feet are bare, her long dark hair spilling over the collar of her polo dress. She occasionally turns a watchful eye to her new rescue, Foxy, a German shepherd–Siberian husky–1 percent Chihuahua mix, according to a DNA test she ordered to check for coyote (it came back negative).

“Wigs were lost,” says Zhao. “You get that from taking mushrooms, you get that from making love. You get that from dancing.”

Raves had been an on-set ritual. Zhao filmed them all and played a 27-minute supercut at the wrap party. (Irish Mescal seemed especially liberated by the exercise.) A student of tantra, the ancient spiritual practice of releasing energy and emotions through the body, the director introduced dance to help actors and camerapeople alike shake off Hamnet’s heavy material: the death of Shakespeare’s 11-year-old son, the real-life and lesser known tragedy that laid the scene for Hamlet.

The experience “changed my concept of what true leadership is,” Mescal tells me in a voice note. “She’s asking for her actors to be incredibly vulnerable, and I think she gives you that confidence by being vulnerable herself,” he says. “I’ve rarely had an intimacy that I have with Chloé.”

Zhao’s holistic approach to the Bard birthed a guttural scream of a film that emotionally draws and quarters you, illuminating the difference between director and auteur—the reason, perhaps, why Hamnet’s hallowed producers Steven Spielberg and Sam Mendes tapped her in the first place. “Every decision Chloé makes as a filmmaker comes from her feelings and not her thoughts,” Spielberg tells me in an email. “Like Agnes in Hamnet,” a mystic at one with the woods of Stratford-upon-Avon, “I have always had a feeling that Chlóe is a creation of the earth itself.”

The adaptation of Maggie O’Fárrell’s best-selling novel also returns Zhao to the Oscar conversation. It’s been almost five years since the Chinese-born filmmaker became the first and only woman of color to win best director, for Nomadland. Months after that laurel came Eternals, Zhao’s first blockbuster and first critical miss (even as it delivered Marvel’s first queer kiss).

Zhao is celebrated for her genre-defying choices. A Shakespearean period piece may be her most personal movie yet. It’s the one that forced her to look inward, where she found love in a hopeless place.

How could a woman who’s not a mother capture the darkness of losing a child? That was Zhao’s concern when Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment first called about Hamnet in 2022. Zhao initially turned them down. She worried about cracking Agnes but could relate to Will, the creative soul who simmers in his grief.

“For four years, since Nomadland and Eternals, I experienced one after another personal loss,” Zhao tells me in her soft, accented voice, “that accumulated to a tidal wave.”

Cinephiles online have speculated that one of those losses is a breakup from her longtime romantic and creative partner, British cinematographer Joshua James Richards. Hamnet is the first of Zhao’s films for which Richards is not credited.

“Like Agnes in Hamnet,” says Steven Spielberg, “I have always had a feeling that Chlóe is a creation of the earth itself.”

When I tell Zhao I’m sorry for her losses, she declines specifics, but a few weeks later she clarifies in a text message that “my relationship with Josh ending two and half years ago was one of them. I was with someone else while I was making Hamnet, and I won’t speak of our relationship to respect his privacy. The truth is that many of the male characters in my films are mosaics of the men in my life. I try to show their perspectives, their unspoken pain and grief, their repressed shadows and brilliant light, in an attempt to learn how to better love them and be loved by them.”

Zhao is candid about her grief. “I have a deep fear of being abandoned, worse than death, almost,” she tells me, petting one of Foxy’s alligator toys. “But when that happens, you have a chance to know death.”

Zhao found parallels to Agnes after all. She doesn’t measure her pain “any less than a mother losing a child.”

Up until Hamnet, Zhao had ignored motherhood in her work. She seldom speaks publicly about her own mother, who worked at a hospital in her native China. Her parents divorced, and when she was a teenager, her father, Zhao Yuji, a former executive at one of China’s largest state-owned steel companies, remarried sitcom actor Song Dandan. As Zhao chronicled the poverty of the American West in her first films, she faced backlash on Twitter and Reddit over her family privilege, but she has denied rumors her father is a billionaire.

At 14, she enrolled at Brighton College, a British boarding school she has likened to Hogwarts. Allured by Hollywood, she moved to Los Angeles, attending Los Angeles High School and living alone in a Koreatown apartment at 18.

For Hamnet, a film centered in Buckley’s primal portrayal of Agnes, Zhao vowed: “I’m going to come in and work in a way as if I were the mother that I wish I had. When you feel like you are loved by that kind of mother, you’re not afraid to show your emotions. You’re never going to be judged. You’re seen unconditionally.”

When she started writing the screenplay for Hamnet with O’Farrell last January, Zhao was wondering if she’d ever have children. Now, even with the horror it depicts—and, to be fair, the joy and whimsy of family life—the film “makes me want to be a mom,” she says, smiling. “I think the reason why I have not had children is because I didn’t think I would be a good mom. I didn’t think I could do it, and I don’t want to pass anything down to my children.”

Nurturing Hamnet’s cast and crew—facing what she’d long avoided— shifted her outlook. Behind the scenes, Zhao urged her players to “gather around the mother” for inspiration—not her, necessarily, but a higher feminine power. Still, when the cast—including 12-year-old Jacobi Jupe, who plays the titular boy—reunited on the red carpet for Hamnet’s premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival last fall, they gathered around Zhao.

Both are true: Zhao is a deeply mindful director, and she has not transcended the baldly human, wholly Hollywood lust for another Oscar.

“I don’t believe anyone,” Zhao says, smirking, “when they say they don’t want it.” (Never forget that as a fledgling indie filmmaker, she successfully pitched herself to the top of a $230 million Marvel production.)

“I'm going to work as if I were the mother that I wish I had,” says Zhao. “When you feel like you are loved by that kind of mother, you're seen unconditionally.”

Zhao was last seen double-fisting Oscars at the socially distanced ceremony in 2021. In a golden Princess Leia gown and white sneakers, both by Hermès, she became the second of only three women in the Oscars’ 96-year history to win best director, following Kathryn Bigelow for The Hurt Locker in 2010 and teeing up Jane Campion, who won for The Power of the Dog, in 2022. Unfortunately for the internet, Zhao, Bigelow, and Campion have neither a secret coven nor a text chain.

“You become something the world can project onto,” Zhao reflects. She accepted her statuettes at the first Oscars after the mass protests for racial justice in 2020 and institutional pushes for diversity that are now being rolled back. News of her victory was censored in China over her past comments that it’s a “place of lies,” though fans there still celebrated her in code, referring to Zhao as “daughter of the clouds” after posts using her name were blocked on Weibo.

For a long time after she won, Zhao believed she didn’t deserve the honor. It’s not that she felt Nomadland was unworthy. “It is this deep—it’s very sad—inability to receive,” she explains, alluding to a childhood where asking for praise was complicated.

If she’s back at the Oscars in 2026, she’ll be ready to take a compliment. Zhao’s early prospects are as solid as Hamnet’s reviews, and she’s as ambitious for her stars as she is herself. When I tell her that I’ve heard Buckley’s stirring performance has all but ended the best actress race, Zhao crosses her fingers and says: “I selfishly hope so.” Zhao is obsessed with the cultural spectacle of the Oscars, which she likens to Halloween, a reality show, and a war zone, a comparison that makes her dissolve into laughter.

She appreciates awards season as a time when “this group of very lonely, mostly socially awkward people” is paid to hang out, but working rooms is fraught for Zhao, who calls herself “deeply neurodivergent.” (She eschews labels, saying she’s undergone evaluations in recent years and is still “learning the big picture.”)

“Small talk almost puts me into a panic attack,” she explains. “I take in 10 times more information than a lot of my friends, so then I get easily overwhelmed.” Often Zhao is still struggling to process a conversation with one person when another begins. And “if that goes on for too long, I implode.” Loud noises? Perfumes? “Total shutdown.”

“That’s why I don’t socialize very much,” Zhao cracks.

We happen to meet in the middle of a frenetic week, when President Trump and Health and Human Services secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. are touting a bogus link between Tylenol use in pregnant women and autism. Stigmatizing neurodivergent people is based on the false premise, Zhao says, that modern society is normal at all.

“Our conditions are actually filtering more and more people into ‘abnormal,’ ” she says, citing loud, bright, overcrowded cities and demanding work cultures. “Eventually,” Zhao laughs a little—as one has to sometimes—“there might be a very small amount of people who can handle it.”

“I want to be careful of cornering us, putting us in boxes,” Zhao says. With tools and support, “you have a superpower.”

For an important Oscar-winning director, Zhao has no airs. She doesn’t subscribe to the ideas of high or low culture. One of the many games stacked on the coffee table between us is Renunciation: A Game of Capitalism and Karma, which is won by shedding all of your material possessions.

On the eve of her historic Oscar win, she was attached to make a “futuristic sci-fi Western” adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Two days after Zhao finished Hamnet, she segued, for the first time, to television, diving into her continuation of Buffy the Vampire Slayer for Hulu.

Yes, Zhao would love another Oscar. “I don't believe anyone,” she smirks, “when they say they don't want it.”

Zhao has bled for the sexy-pulpy WB series since huddling to watch with her college dorm mates at Mount Holyoke. “Buffy’s about found family,” she says. (As the show is gay canon, Zhao’s queer friends were all very excited when she signed on.) Twenty-three years after the finale, “we thought it may be time for a new wave of monsters and vampires and demons that we get to learn about our humanity through.”

First, though, she had to slay Buffy. Sarah Michelle Gellar had consistently shot down the idea of a resurrection—until Zhao. “That is all credit to the visionary Chloé is,” Gellar tells me in an email, citing her talent for world-building and “an international eye which broadens the scope of what we can achieve.”

The director heard Gellar’s concerns, and yet, Zhao says, “I think we chose each other in that moment.”

“No one knows Buffy better than Sarah Michelle Gellar…and that’s why I couldn’t do it unless she felt like we should,” Zhao says. “The way the fans commune around her, that’s the energy we’re trying to bring out onto a small screen again.” That Zhao was one of them helped sway Gellar.

“This version is coming from the true fan that is desperate to revisit the world, not reinvent,” Gellar writes. She once told Zhao that she regretted not taking the class protector umbrella from the original series’ prom episode. On the last day of filming the sequel, Zhao presented Gellar with an exact replica.

I ask Zhao if the reports are true, that Gellar plays a mentor to a new teen slayer, but I’ve trespassed into spoiler territory. All Zhao can say now is: “She’s very much in it.”

The club of best directors who double as best picture–winning producers is small, storied, and like the profession itself, majority male. Among them are Eastwood, del Toro, Iñárritu, and Zhao.

“Her technical abilities are second to none,” Mescal says, but her soulfulness is “what sets her apart.”

Beyond Buffy, the “upcoming” tab of her IMDB page is currently blank. Much has been made of Zhao’s “female gaze,” but she’s relying now on her woman’s intuition. Despite her male-dominated industry and our male-dominated political moment, Zhao senses a “feminine consciousness” bubbling up all around us, a new era of enlightenment full of compassion and heart. You know the shift is happening, she says, when the resistance rises to suppress it. Zhao speaks so confidently, I feel a rare ripple of hope: “Let’s be ready.”

Hair and makeup, Salvador Gonzalez; set design, Viki Rutsch. Produced on location by Preiss Creative. For details, go to VF.com/credits.