Pinny Grylls and Sam Crane

Why do you think Hamlet specifically fitted so well inside Grand Theft Auto? Was it the violence, the surveillance, the performance-within-a-performance, or something else?

All of those things played a role, but I think the deepest fit was something else: a shared psychological architecture. Hamlet is a play defined by a paradox: its hero feels simultaneously “bounded in a nutshell” and “king of infinite space”, and GTA Online replicates that paradox structurally. You’re physically confined to a controller and a screen, yet inside Los Santos you experience something close to limitless freedom. That tension between confinement and possibility is baked into both works.

It also showed up in the moment-to-moment texture of playing. Hamlet’s dualistic vision of the world in the “What a piece of work is a man” speech, swinging between wonder and disgust, beauty and corruption, maps directly onto what GTA actually feels like to play. A beautifully rendered digital sunrise is “a majestical roof fretted with golden fire.” The pixelated dust and debris thrown up by a rocket-propelled grenade attack is “a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours.” The game’s capacity to lurch between breathtaking beauty and sudden violent destruction isn’t just thematically compatible with Hamlet, it’s almost a staging of his psychology.

There’s also a structural affinity between the two worlds themselves. Rockstar built Los Santos not from direct observation of Los Angeles but – as their art director put it – from “the way a place lives in your head,” layered through film, music and television. Shakespeare’s Elsinore is constructed the same way: not from firsthand knowledge of medieval Denmark but from accumulated cultural representations. And both worlds have become so culturally dominant that they now generate people’s sense of reality rather than simply reflecting it.

Did performing through avatars make the acting more distant, or did it unlock something more honest because the actors were masked by the game?

Both, but the interesting thing is how the constraints themselves became creative.

The avatar gave us a genuine physical vocabulary. My Hamlet could walk, push, turn, climb, so basic staging was possible. But the more revelatory discovery came from the game’s emote system. GTA offers a big library of emotes, a surprisingly nuanced catalogue of gestures, poses and physical expressions ranging from the mundane to the absurd, offering in theory a richly varied mode of physical communication. In practice, however, accessing them requires navigating several layers of menus and submenus, making it far too cumbersome to switch between them in the flow of performance. So rather than using emotes naturalistically – reaching for a new gesture moment to moment as an actor might – each performer chose a single emote that would serve for an extended period of time, repeating it as a kind of rhythmic punctuation. The result was something closer to Brechtian gestus or commedia dell’arte than to naturalism: not the expression of an emotion but an emblematic symbol of a character. My emote for Hamlet was “facepalm” – an anguished head-in-hands gesture that became a shorthand for his existential melancholia.

So the avatar didn’t create distance, it created a different kind of honesty. The limitation stripped away the noise of naturalistic performance and forced something more deliberate and expressionistic. A 21st-century game mechanic turned out to be a surprisingly direct route back to much older modes of theatre.

Hamlet as a play is full of watching, spying, staged behaviour and performance. GTA is also a world where players are both actors and spectators. Did that connection help shape the film?

Absolutely. Hamlet is arguably the great spectator of English drama. He engineers The Mousetrap specifically to watch Claudius watching it: “I’ll observe his looks, I’ll tent him to the quick”  and in that moment of spectatorship within spectatorship, he drives the entire plot forward. Watching, in this play, is never passive.

Playing GTA involves exactly the same duality. The left thumbstick moves your avatar; the right controls the camera. You are simultaneously actor and spectator of your own actions at every moment. As Emma Westecott observes of the act of playing video games, ‘the player is always audience to her own play act.’ So this undeniable fact of playing video games helped me connect to Hamlet’s focus and fascination with spectatorship.