Chloé Zhao Is Open to New Discoveries
Chloé Zhao Is Open to New Discoveries
Kaitlyn McNabThu, February 26, 2026 at 7:09 PM UTC
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Chloé Zhao Credit - Christina House—Los Angeles Times/Contour RA/GettyImages
In 2021, after directing the Marvel movie Eternals, Chloé Zhao made a decision that some found surprising, even unthinkable, for a filmmaker who had achieved remarkable success: she stepped away from Hollywood. “I was going linear for a decade and I crashed,” she says. “I spent four years regenerating that soil.”
In November, the Chinese writer, director, and producer made a highly anticipated return with Hamnet, her fifth feature film. Starring Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal, and based on the novel by Maggie O’Farrell, the movie offers a fictionalized account of events that could have inspired Shakespeare’s Hamlet. It’s a portrait of grief and healing, told through the eyes of the playwright’s wife. “Going into Hamnet, having built an inner temple and inner safety net,” Zhao says, “I am able to be vulnerable.” ‘’
Her intentionality paid off: Hamnet has been on a remarkable awards-season run. In January, it won the Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture, Drama, with Buckley earning Best Performance by a Female Actor. At this year’s Oscars, the film will compete for Best Picture, while Zhao is in the running for Best Director—her second nomination after her historic win in 2021, when she became the first woman of color to receive the award, for Nomadland.
Zhao, 43, underscores the ways in which femininity is an asset in the arts. “Our intuition and our ability to shape the world around us is extremely powerful ... We can shape reality from our emotionality [and] somatic wisdom,” she says, adding that these qualities are part of why women have long been oppressed: “Usually what people try to destroy is what they’re afraid of the most.”
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Zhao also credits this embrace of her interior self for renewing her confidence in both choosing projects and leading on set. “I focus on trying to let that part of myself come through to the right producers, the right studios, the right projects,” she says, adding that “the right actors start to come to me, as well. Once they come, I make sure that I really trust them and ask them to say, ‘This is what I need. This is the best environment that I can do this work.’”
She shares a story of a recent trip to Pompeii, where she was told she would make a good archaeologist. To Zhao, archaeology and directing require a similar mindset. “Every day as you’re uncovering the dirt, you find something,” she says. “And that thing is going to tell you a different story than what you think is happening.”
Correction, Feb. 26
The original version of this story misstated the number of feature films Zhao has directed. She has made five feature films, not six.
Contact us at letters@time.com.
Source: “AOL Entertainment”
