Sheeba Chaddha Interview: On Playing Gertrude in Riz Ahmed’s 'Hamlet' and Tackling Shakespeare’s Most Scrutinised Mother Character

If Sheeba Chaddha felt daunted by stepping into Gertrude’s shoes, she doesn’t let on. “Honestly, I had no idea there was a wave,” she says, when told that her latest project seems to coincide with a full-blown Shakespearean renaissance of sorts in Hollywood. While Chaddha is part of Riz Ahmed’s Hamlet, there is also Chloé Zhao’s reimagining of the same play with Hamnet and Oscar Isaac tackling King Hamlet in the works currently.

“I was just fortunate to be offered this part and went into it. But if there is a wave, I’m happy to be part of it, to reconnect with this world of Shakespeare," she tells us.

It is a typically unshowy answer from an actor who has built a career out of resisting the obvious choice, who has breathed life into mothers, aunts, neighbours, women whose contradictions are never smoothed away, from the bereaved yet dogged matriarch of Pagglait to the quietly fierce mother of Doctor G. In Gertrude, she has found perhaps the most scrutinised mother of all: a queen who marries her late husband’s brother with suspicious haste, whose love for her son is absolute and whose choices nonetheless devastate him. “Gertrude is hard because she’s torn,” Chaddha says simply. “There’s immense love for her son, and yet she chooses to marry Claudius so soon after her husband’s death. You can give it any number of backstories — maybe there was love before, maybe it was duty. But it’s devastating for Hamlet. Not only has he lost his father, he feels he’s lost his mother too.”

Chaddha does not so much resolve the contradiction as live inside it. “I don’t try to solve it. The conflict, the push and pull, the love and the self-preservation — that’s the reality. I just tried to hold all of that in my head and submit to it.” It is this refusal to simplify that makes her Gertrude compelling, never reduced to archetype. “As a mother, guilt is always present,” she continues, “but Gertrude isn’t letting go of her choices either. She is engaging with the situation as it is, knowing she still has love for Claudius and yet is affected by Hamlet’s devastation.”

Chaddha’s approach was shaped by instinct. She has avoided watching other versions of Hamlet, including Vishal Bhardwaj’s Haider, where Tabu’s portrayal of Ghazala is widely regarded as one of her finest performances. “I do no homework,” Chaddha says with a laugh. “I watch very little content anyway and I haven’t even seen Haider, though I’m a huge fan of Vishal’s work. I can’t recall seeing a Hamlet or a Gertrude at all. So if something has filtered in unconsciously, fine. But consciously, no. I just work from my own place.”

The film, which sets the tragedy in present-day London and casts the Danish royal family as a wealthy British-Indian clan, retains Shakespeare’s text almost entirely, though lines are occasionally rearranged. It is a context that feels both natural and radical, foregrounding questions of inheritance, power, and empire that haunt the city even now. “London has its own conversations around real estate, wealth, and power,” Chaddha says. “The tragedy at the heart of it sits just as potently in this world.”

For Chaddha, whose only formal Shakespeare training was a month-long course at RADA nearly 25 years ago, the approach was instinctive rather than academic. “My teacher had a ‘wonderful irreverence’ for Shakespeare,” she recalls with a laugh. “I didn’t set out to be irreverent, but I was never intimidated by the iambic pentameter or the formality of it. The heart of Shakespeare always spoke to me more than the rhythm.”

Riz Ahmed in a still from 'Hamlet'

It helped that she was playing opposite Ahmed, whose own passion for the text — he has been developing this project for nearly two decades — lifted the entire ensemble. “His rigour is incredible,” Chaddha says. “He thinks through an emotion and it feels almost cerebral, but the heart is always the backdrop. I don’t work like that, I’m more instinctive, but it was amazing to riff with him. His love for the text raises the bar for everyone around him.”

In a career that has spanned Hindi cinema and theatre, Hamlet feels like a late but welcome arrival. “Of course there have been times I’ve wished for roles like this,” she admits, “But I try not to dwell on regret. Things come when they’re meant to; OTT has changed the game for actors like me who are finally getting the space to really perform, to find joy in our work.”

Chaddha hasn’t yet seen the finished film but its imminent screenings at BFI London and a possible showing in Mumbai have her hopeful. “Hamlet’s world is mesmerising, magnetic,” she says. “It pulls you in. It’s visceral, guttural, it hits you in so many centres of your being. I’m just so happy to have been part of it.”