How Grand Theft Hamlet evolved from lockdown escape to Shakespearean success

During the dark days of lockdown, we all found ways to connect. Some of us ran Zoom quizzes with mates. Some of us hit play on the same movie as our family on the other side of the world. Some of us staged an immersive, independent, multi-location production of Shakespeare's Hamlet within the world of Grand Theft Auto Online.

The latter is exactly what filmmakers Pinny Gryllis, Sam Crane, and Mark Oosterveen did, filming the ideation, rehearsal, location scouting, casting, and eventual performance of the tragedy befalling the Prince of Denmark all within Rockstar Games' online universe. Grand Theft Hamlet is nothing short of a groundbreaking work of cinema, one that explores the connections between players in online multiplayer action-adventure games, embodies the difficulty of creative pursuits and making theatre, and just how important online spaces were to us during the isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In the film, we meet friends Crane and Oosterveen playing GTA online during the third lockdown in the UK. It was a bleak time. They're both theatre actors who found themselves out of work when venues closed (Crane was just about to start his run as Harry Potter in The Cursed Child on the West End). In the film, we never see them in real life — only as their avatars, running around stealing cars and generally causing chaos. During one fateful session, they stumble across an outdoor theatre, and naturally find themselves quoting Shakespeare to the empty crowd while standing onstage.

Crane and Oosterveen started capturing these moments in-game and posting short videos on YouTube, after which Gryllis also joined the game and encouraged them to up their efforts and make it into a large-scale project — Gryllis found a smartphone in her avatar's pocket which could film close up shots; you can see her character filming on her phone during some scenes. From here, the idea snowballs, and the trio start to produce a production of Hamlet just like you would in real life — only here, strangers might just wander through your rehearsal and shoot everyone. Respawning becomes part and parcel of the whole gig.

Grand Theft Hamlet joins the leagues of machinima

Though it's a landmark moment for mainstream cinema and video game overlap, Grand Theft Hamlet isn't the first work of machinima — the art of making narrative films within video games or using video game engines. Artists have dabbled in this arena for decades.

"Machinima has been around for a while. It was one of the kind of early things on YouTube," said Crane onstage at BAFTA, in London in October.

"There was a series called Red vs. Blue, it was very popular in the early noughties... [Machinima] has been around for a while, and I think there's interestingly been quite a resurgence in it in recent years, maybe as video games have got more sophisticated and visually more impressive. And also, I think generally, as video games as a cultural medium have gained a bit more respect, maybe amongst people beyond the traditional gaming audience as well."

Grand Theft Hamlet reminds viewers of high art/low art hypocrisy

While staging the production inside the game, Grand Theft Hamlet manages to expose age-old, insufferable, pointless high art vs low art snobbery by fusing Shakespeare with video games. Crane, Oosterveen, and Gryllis spoke about how people have forgotten how Shakespeare's plays were seen as entertainment for the masses in his time, while dismissing the sophistication, intricacy, and timely creativity of modern video games.

"It was considered low art for the masses in Shakespeare's day in much the same way not all but many people from the theatre establishment look at people who play video games and take them seriously and look down on that and think, 'What are you doing with that juvenile nonsense?' I think that is how Shakespeare was viewed," said Crane.

"Shakespeare was, in his day, originally, a very kind of rough, popular entertainment. It was kind of rowdy and a bit naughty, and rough, funny, sweary, and violent," said Oosterveen.

Grand Theft Hamlet is a truly independent, bedroom-made film

When people throw the word "independent film" around, there can be some grey areas. But Grand Theft Hamlet was quite literally made in Gryllis, Crane, and Oosterveen's homes.

"We had a screening at the IMAX last week for London Film Festival, which was just sort of surreal, because I was like, I made this in my bedroom on a Mac with Adobe Premiere," said Gryllis. "We had a capture card, which we captured everything in 4K you know, we didn't have sophisticated post production. It was really, really handmade and on quite a low budget. It was an experiment, but that gives you a lot of freedom, right?"

"We were filming everything. We were always recording. It annoys me a little bit, because a lot of people are like, 'Oh, you couldn't have possibly, that looks like it might be staged or set up. It genuinely happened, like we did have an argument, and it was a continuation of an argument we'd had the night before in real life, but it was still an argument," she said.

Gryllis also pointed out the incredible accessibility gaming provided her as a filmmaker who is deaf, with the technology empowering her where other mediums may not.

"Filmmaking still is really an inaccessible artform to a great number of people — women, it's getting a bit better, but not people who are excluded because of their disability. Gaming does provide you know, anyone can do that, anyone can jump into a gaming server and start filming and recording something and making a story and then editing it," she said.

"I, as a deaf person, had live captioning, when I was interacting with people, I was able to read the captions on my phone with Otter. I stopped making films completely in 2016 when I lost my hearing, because I thought well that's it, it's an audio visual medium, it's over for me. So it's been a really accessible form of filmmaking for me. And I think you'll see from the film, a lot of people who we met, I think, felt very included in the process — maybe they wouldn't have been in theater."

And speaking of the people featured in the film, really, the cast — they're a major part of what makes Grand Theft Hamlet so uniquely online and disruptive to an industry that's notoriously hard to get a foot in the door: acting.

Grand Theft Hamlet has a truly miscellaneous, marvellous cast

While I won't spoil exactly how Grand Theft Hamlet recruited its cast, one of the most intriguing elements of the film is how the band got together. Players show up and take auditions and rehearsals seriously, others stand silently by, intrigued by the project, others simply shoot everyone and leave — as is the GTA way. But from a production perspective, it was a challenge for the team to actually lock down, request and get permission for the cast to appear in the final film.

"You've obviously got access to these incredible characters but then it's that thing of they're wearing a mask because they're avatars. Some even had voice changers. We didn't include it in the film, but some of them talked through live translation software, which was actually a digital voice. So the only thing you've got to go on is their gamertag," said Gryllis.

"We made sure that everybody knew that we were recording our footage. We asked them is it OK, do you want to be in this documentary? Can we contact you through PlayStation, and again to verify that? So we had to do everything that you would have to do in a normal documentary. I certainly knew about that from my own background. Sometimes people said no, and there was a lot of kids on the server. We had to go and change servers quite a lot, actually, because we've got people underage that we couldn't include."

The team recruited characters both in game (you should watch the film for their brilliant techniques) and outside the game, from their contacts in theatre. "I think it's me that said it, there's a line in the film, but there's a Venn diagram of people who are into theatre and people into GTA, and there's this tiny, tiny overlap. That's not a joke," said Oosterveen.

NPCs served a higher purpose in Grand Theft Hamlet

If you've ever played GTA, you'll know the NPCs (non playable characters) are crucial to the game's environment — and it turned out, the same went for performing Hamlet within it.

"They sort of became a bit like a Greek chorus in that you could put onto them through filming and editing, almost like a mirror of the emotions of the main characters that I was filming. And they were really moving, they would really listen to you and respond," said Gryllis.

Especially in scenes where the performers get angry or have an argument (one is a real argument between Crane and Gryllis), you can see the NPCs in the game become intrigued, scared, and even cower during these exchanges.

"They're also a tool for us as performers learning about that world and seeing them as a lens to understand Shakespeare within that world. You see when we're trying to work out how to do 'to be or not to be', and discovering all these NPCs and a dive bar and the way they they talk to us and respond to us in the way they exist in that world," said Crane.

When you eventually do get to experience Hamlet within GTA through Grand Theft Hamlet, it's overwhelming, moving, and a one-of-a-kind production. I'm not going to tell you anything, because this is theatre. You just have to experience it for yourself.

Grand Theft Hamlet is out now in UK cinemas. It will release globally in 2025 before streaming on Mubi.