Oscar Isaac and his wife, director Elvira Lind (Bobbie Jene), made a splash in Copenhagen on Wednesday evening with the international premiere of King Hamlet at the 23rd edition of the Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival, or CPH:DOX, followed by a warm Q&A with the hometown crowd.
Lind’s film, which she shot a decade ago, is a deeply personal portrait of her actor husband as he tackles what the documentary describes as “the most difficult role of his life” — playing Hamlet at New York’s Public Theater. The film captures Isaac navigating the demands of the role while also expecting his first child with Lind and grieving the recent loss of his mother.
King Hamlet comes from producers Sara Stockmann and Sofia Sondervan, alongside Lind and Isaac’s Mad Gene Media, Sonntag Pictures and Dutch Tilt Film.
CPH:DOX in a preview of Wednesday’s premiere of the film quoted Lind as saying: “When I started filming this project, it wasn’t so much Shakespeare’s text about grief and revenge that interested me, but how Oscar would crawl under Hamlet’s skin and live there for a period of time, losing himself in it. Oscar likes to delve deeply into his work and allow himself to disappear completely into the process, and that was exactly what I wanted to document — it was the dance I dreamed of.”
After a warm reception from the Copenhagen audience — many of them friends and family — Lind was visibly moved. “It’s so amazing to take this film to Denmark and share with everyone here where the film was made, and I was made, too,” she said.
The project began modestly. Lind recalled thinking she would simply film her then-boyfriend’s theater workshop, with no grand plan for a documentary. They were also filming at home, she added — at which point Isaac turned to the audience with a quip: “Not those kinds of films.” The joke took a beat to land, then drew laughter from the crowd.
Isaac said the understanding at the time was that the footage “might never see the light of day.” He also credited his wife’s unobtrusive camera work for much of what the film captures. “She’s kind of a ninja,” he said. “She can be quite invisible. She’s like a nature photographer — she doesn’t spook the elk while filming, or the cheetahs.”
Access wasn’t always easy. The rehearsal space had restrictions, and Lind tackled the project with a newborn. “Me with a baby just maybe didn’t feel like what they needed,” she told the audience. At home, meanwhile, Isaac wasn’t always ready for the camera either. “Oh no, not now,” he recalled telling her when she greeted him with it after a long day’s work. “But,” he added, “that’s part of the tension of the film.”
Isaac compared King Hamlet to a film about a band making an album. “You really see this group come together,” he said. The couple’s son Eugene — shown in the documentary both in the womb and as a baby — was in the audience for Wednesday’s premiere.
For Isaac, the film also captures something irretrievable. “It does feel like you get to see how unglamorous it can be, and what a weird thing it is, particularly theater,” he said. He called the film “a miracle” for the way it preserves “the fluidity of the moment. You just see it disappear. There are people in this film, in my family, who are no longer with us as well.”
Watching himself on screen ten years later, Isaac was struck by how much has changed. The film shows him saying that after his mother’s death, the only thing that pulls him out of his grief is thinking about the play. “Now I would say to that person: ‘Don’t get out of your sorrow. You don’t have to escape it. And there is no escaping it.’”
For Lind, making the film was its own revelation. “I had no idea what it took,” she said of her husband’s process. “Seeing him go through it was really intense.”
Acting, Isaac reflected, is “a condensing of myself” rather than the playing of other people — and the film is ultimately about that particular challenge. “We are watching someone on a tightrope with their own ego and their own feelings of humiliation, and do they overcome it or not and how?”
As for what comes next: Lind is developing a fiction project, though documentaries, she says, “remain my first love.” Isaac, for his part, is in no rush to return to the stage. Theater is “all-consuming,” he said. “When I do it again, maybe it will be a one-act play.”
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