Hey guys, Willie Geist here with another episode of the Sunday Sit Down podcast.

My thanks as always for clicking and listening along.

Really happy to bring in my conversation this week with one of the brightest rising stars in Hollywood, Paul Meskel.

You may know him best as the star of Gladiator 2, where he went toe to toe and face-to-face

with Denzel Washington in a massive blockbuster that grossed, I don't know, half a billion

dollars or something like that.

He's starring now in a movie called Hamnet, based on the novel, a very popular novel. He plays

William Shakespeare in this just extraordinary movie that provides the backstory, the inspiration

for his tragedy, Hamlet. It's the story of his real-life son. He had twin sons, the real-life

William Shakespeare. This is in around

1580, we're talking about. And he has twin children, a boy and a girl. The boy's name is Hamnet. And he

dies at 11 years old of the pestilence, as they called it back then, got sick and died. So it's this

at first beautiful and then agonizing story of young

William Shakespeare, who's just a Latin tutor and an aspiring playwright. Nobody knows who he is yet.

Who's now getting a little bit of acclaim and going to London and the Globe Theater to stage his plays,

shuttling back and forth to the countryside where his family is. It's just

so well-acted across from an actress named Jesse Buckley, who plays his wife, Shakespeare's wife,

and you can bet we'll be getting a lot of Oscar talk for this performance, both of them will.

So a great guy, so happy to sit down with him. You might remember, too, if you're a fan.

He kind of burst onto the scene in 2020 with the show Normal People, the series.

It was on Hulu, a BBC thing that just became a big hit took off during the pandemic.

Then he earned an Oscar nomination for his performance in the movie After Sun.

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