Trevor Nunn on casting a 23-year-old Ben Whishaw as Hamlet:
“I suppose I did do something crazy,” Nunn says now, when I ask him about the casting. “But I’d grown intolerant of Hamlets where the production failed to honour the idea that he was a student. I wanted to do a Hamlet for the gap-year generation. I saw loads of young actors, of whom Ben was one. “I was riveted straightaway. In one sense he was like a teenager, not fully formed. But there was also this tremendous intelligence and quickness of thought. He has a poetic quality; there was something intangible about him. And when he did ‘To be or not to be’, you really felt you were watching someone who might kill himself.”