Culture Gabfest - Is Hamnet this Year’s Oscar Villain? Edition
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Slate Podcasts
4.2 • 2K Ratings
🗓️ 28 January 2026
⏱️ 88 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Shuffling under the mortal coil this week (aka hosting the Gabfest), it’s our OG players Steve, Dana, and Julia. Like a morose Danish prince contemplating a human skull, they gaze upon the Oscar nominated Hamnet, based on the novel by Maggie O’Farrell inspired by William Shakespeare’s life. Directed by Chloé Zhao and starring Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal, Hamnet has brought some critics to tears and left others cold. Our hosts share where they landed.
Next, they boot up the Netflix content machine to view The Rip, a new cop caper reuniting Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. Do the boys from Boston (illogically playing Miami cops) make good again? Finally, they welcome New Yorker writer Clare Malone to discuss her recent profile of the deeply polarizing, newly-appointed head of CBS News Bari Weiss.
In a special add-on, Isaac Butler leaves a voice memo to share his vituperative take on Hamnet—as outlined in a recent Slate piece. The Hamnet discourse continues in a bonus episode exclusively for Slate Plus subscribers wherein the gang unpacks the film’s ending. Is the play indeed the thing?
Endorsements
Dana: The book Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell especially the audiobook version read by Jessie Buckley.
Julia: The hilarious video of Matt Damon and Ben Affleck with Jimmy Fallon naming all the towns in Massachusetts on The Tonight Show, the sober, intelligent New York Times opinion round table between Lydia Polgreen, David French, and Michelle Goldberg about ICE raids in Minneapolis and the killing of Alex Pretti, and the still deeply timely film I’m Still Here.
Steve: The film Sentimental Value and the double album Sing the Children Over & Sand In My Shoe by the singer/songwriter Kath Bloom as well as the Kath Bloom cover “Come Here” by the band The Concretes.
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Podcast production by Kevin Bendis. Production assistance by Daniel Hirsch.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm Stephen McHaffin. This is the Slate Culture Gapfest. Is Hamnet this year's Oscar |
| 0:14.5 | Villain edition? It's Wednesday, January 28, 2006. On today's show, Hamnet stars Jesse Buckley as Agnes Hathaway. We'll get into |
| 0:24.6 | why she's called Agnes in this movie, even though she's often simply known as Anne Hathaway. |
| 0:30.5 | She was once exclusively known as Shakespeare's mostly estranged wife, a woman left behind in |
| 0:36.0 | Stratford to raise children and fend off bubonic plague, |
| 0:38.8 | while her husband in London became rich, famous, and world historically great. |
| 0:43.8 | Hathaway is given an existence and story of her own in Chloe Zhao's new movie, |
| 0:47.6 | an adaptation of the runaway 2020 bestseller by the same name. |
| 0:52.4 | It also stars Paul Mascal as the Bard. |
| 0:55.5 | And then, oh, oh, Matt and Ben, what would we do without you? |
| 0:58.9 | Turns out we will never know. |
| 1:01.1 | The Goodwill Hunting duo returns with The Rip, a cop caper on Netflix from the creator Joe Carnahan. |
| 1:07.9 | And finally, CBS News, I mean, the home of Edward R. Murrow, I mean, the lineage, right, |
| 1:13.1 | of Edward R. Murrow to Cronkite, to Dan, rather. |
| 1:15.6 | It was once the jewel of broadcast news. |
| 1:18.2 | It's not debt to John Dickerson, I should say. |
| 1:20.5 | And it's now the play thing, as some people characterize it of Barry Weiss. |
| 1:25.0 | We will discuss with the New Yorker writer Claire Malone, |
| 1:28.0 | who has a huge profile of Weiss Out in the magazine. Joining me today is Julia Turner, a fellow |
| 1:35.1 | at the Annenberg School of Journalism at the University of Southern California. Hey, Julia. |
| 1:39.8 | Good morning. And Dana Stevens, the film critic for Slate. Hey, Dana. |
| 1:45.0 | Greetings. |
... |
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