Not My Father's Son

by Alan Cumming

As I got deeper and deeper into my work, I came to understand that Hamlet really didn’t want to be there. He wanted to be absent. He wanted to be back at university with his friends. He is sickened with his mother’s hasty marriage, distraught to be asked by the ghost of his father—a distant man I thought he didn’t particularly connect with—to avenge his death. To add to it, his girlfriend is dumping him and his friends are spying on him. I decided that there was no way Hamlet was mad. He was slipping into the same deep water as me. He was at the start of a nervous breakdown too.