Jessie Buckley Conjures the Ghost of L.A.’s Million Dollar Theater, Directed by Chloé Zhao

The Million Dollar Theater, in Downtown Los Angeles, derives its name from its rumored cost to build. The Spanish baroque–style cinema was completed in 1918 by the legendary showman Sid Grauman, who would later open the Egyptian and Chinese theaters to even greater fanfare. During Prohibition, the Million Dollar Theater’s basement housed a speakeasy frequented by LAPD officers, accessed discreetly through an underground tunnel; upstairs, in Grauman’s office, silent movie star Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle reportedly learned that he was a suspect in the murder of actor Virginia Rappe, marking the dawn of America’s first celebrity scandal. Given its noir-steeped history, it should come as no surprise that the Million Dollar Theater is haunted.

The ghost lurking within the theater’s moody crimson interior is taking her final curtain call before the venue is knocked down. She also happens to be a dead ringer for this awards season’s best actress front-runner, Jessie Buckley, who plays Agnes Hathaway, the wife of William Shakespeare, in Hamnet, the film adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s novel.

Architecture fans needn’t worry—the ghost story is only Hamnet director Chloé Zhao’s conceit for the W photo shoot you see on these pages; and the theater, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, is safe from demolition. “Haunting” is an appropriate word, however, to describe Buckley’s performance in Hamnet as a mother who must navigate the loss of her child and the impact that has on her marriage to the world’s most celebrated wordsmith, played by Paul Mescal. Ghosts, spirits, and the afterlife are a motif in Hamnet, which is set against the historical backdrop of the bubonic plague and considers some of humanity’s biggest existential questions: What happens when we die? And how do the living go on without us?

“Hamnet is Agnes’s story,” Zhao tells me days after the shoot. “It’s also about two people who are perfect for each other and very different. But what they love about each other is what they can’t understand when tragedy hits.” During our interview, the two-time Oscar winner occupies her hands with a hot pink squish toy, a gift from her publicist that kept her from “imploding” at the 2026 Golden Globes, where Hamnet was awarded best motion picture in the drama category, much to the surprise of a visibly stunned Zhao. (The 43-year-old filmmaker has acknowledged that she has, in her own words, “sensory issues,” and is neurodivergent.)

Back at the theater, Buckley takes her place onstage behind an old-school microphone, dressed in a blue velvet Chanel gown. Her bob—the color of which changes from role to role, adding to the classically trained Irish actor’s chameleonic deftness—is dyed copper blonde and smoothed neatly against her head. The photo shoot is a mini multinational Hamnet reunion, with the Chinese-born Zhao directing, the Polish cinematographer Łukasz Żal filming and taking photographs, and the American dreamwork coach Kim Gillingham on site to offer character guidance. (Gillingham has worked in this capacity, as a kind of facilitator to the unconscious, on numerous film and television productions, including Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog and Bradley Cooper’s Maestro.)

Music pumps through a speaker, filling the nearly two-thousand-seat theater with everything from plaintive classical cello to Sinéad O’Connor’s “Troy” to the spiritual “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child.” Zhao, Buckley, and Gillingham have all prepared playlists for the shoot. While Zhao consistently employs music to prime her actors on set, she was only recently able to articulate, with the help of Hamnet’s composer, Max Richter, why it’s been indispensable to her as a director. “When we met, Max said that we’re made of vibrating particles from the big bang. So music actually tunes the particles we’re made of”—quantum physics at work—“and harmonizes us quickly.” Wearing a floor-length Dôen knit dress and a shaggy Mongolian lamb fur, Zhao appears fully harmonized from the start of the shoot, swaying and dancing to the beat while occasionally inspecting Żal’s work on the monitor. Zhao likens all of this vibe-setting to the “foreplay” that’s necessary for the intimate and collaborative storytelling she’s known for—whether it’s working with nonactors on her critically acclaimed films The Rider and Nomadland or helming a Marvel blockbuster like Eternals in her own way, with less green screen and more realism.

As the team resets for the next series of shots, Buckley closes her eyes and draws in several deep yogic breaths. Gillingham, who led a mass meditation session with the Hamnet cast (plus some 300 extras) before the film’s final scene, says to Buckley in a soothing voice, “You’re at the bottom of a lake, and you want up. Swim toward that feeling.” Buckley stretches her arms in the direction of the theater’s coffered dome ceiling, and Zhao reflexively mirrors her movement. Buckley then sinks deeper into a squat, thrashing her arms about as if she were wrestling something formidable but unseen. The Chanel gown teases slipping off her shoulder.

“Huge gesture,” Gillingham tells her. “In your own time, find a way to bring it to a close.” Buckley grabs the microphone. She’s writhing—in pain or ecstasy or both, it’s hard to know—taking the mic down with her before slowly collapsing onto the stage floor in a velvety heap. “Five stars!” Zhao shouts before running onstage to wrap Buckley and Gillingham up in a group hug.

Later, Zhao confirms that the W photo shoot is an “accurate” representation of how she worked on Hamnet. She was tapped to direct the period piece by Steven Spielberg, a producer on the film, who has said Zhao is the only director he could think of “who would bring Hamnet to the screen with such compassionate care.” Spielberg had a point. “You saw the foreplay, how it got Jessie to a place where it’s not forced?” Zhao asks. “It’s not me saying, ‘I think you should do this and that.’ Once you get the cast and crew onto the same frequency, everyone’s just talking and exchanging ideas and trying things. The ecosystem is really moving.”

Buckley believes Zhao’s attuned directing style brought out the best in her, not only as a performer but also as a person. “Chloé is such an artist in that she’s looking for people’s somatic responses to the material. She’s always trying to distill it to the most primal vibration between us all. Where Agnes had to go, and how brave she was to sit in something that is unfathomable and let it rip through…” she says, her Irish lilt prominent. “I think it has made me braver in my life.”

When Buckley, in a frothy organza confection courtesy of Saint Laurent, reemerges from backstage for the second photo setup, her first instinct is to flash the set by lifting up the gown’s voluminous skirt. “Even ghosts wear Spanx,” Buckley says, laughing. “Don’t you think we should run in this dress?” Zhao looks unconvinced, but after Buckley points out the theater’s long aisles, which, frankly, look designed for a good sprint, Zhao reconsiders. “Just don’t trip,” she says.

Buckley’s husband, Freddie, and their infant daughter, snug in her car seat stroller, arrive at the theater a short while later. Buckley has changed into a slinky Ralph Lauren slipdress and a platinum blonde wig that telegraphs Marilyn Monroe crossed with a mob wife, which seems to confuse the baby. She throws on a burgundy Gucci faux fur to stay warm, and she and Zhao, who’s still in her Mongolian lamb coat, take turns lightly brushing their fur sleeves across Buckley’s daughter’s face, much to the baby’s delight. “Car wash,” Zhao coos, as the fur tendrils tickle the baby’s cheeks, eliciting full-throated giggles. “You don’t have sensory issues like I do!”

Zhao’s neurodivergence makes all the awards shows that she and the cast and crew of Hamnet have attended a bit of a challenge. (The film has received eight Oscar nominations.) “When I look around the room, I know who’s going through the same thing as me. They just have their own stimuli suppression methods,” she says. Though she may have won best picture and best director Academy Awards for Nomadland—making her the first and only woman of color, and just the third woman ever, to win best director—Zhao is quick to remind me that her last major awards circuit happened during the pandemic, over Zoom.

“When you put people in competition with each other, there’s always going to be a bit of a tightness in your gut when you lose,” Zhao says. “I always felt like that discomfort meant that something’s wrong with me. But then someone said to me: ‘Not so long ago, when we had to survive as a tribe, if you were rejected by the tribe, it was a matter of life and death.’ So that rejection is a physical reaction to being abandoned, of not belonging. It’s actually not vanity.”

The shoot migrates to the second floor of the Million Dollar Theater. Its two staircases are lined with framed black and white portraits of Ana Bertha Lepe, a former Miss Mexico; Spanish actor Jorge Mistral, who appeared in films with Sophia Loren and Ursula Andress; and Cuban dancer María Antonieta Pons. They are evidence of just one of the venue’s incarnations—as a showcase for Latin artists—across its 108-year history.

Our ghost is now positioned in the balcony lobby where the theater’s two staircases meet, under its dome ceiling. A mash-up of Dinah Washington’s “This Bitter Earth” and Max Richter’s “On the Nature of Daylight” fills the landing from floor to vault. Richter’s famous string composition was instrumental in the crafting of Hamnet’s end scene, where Agnes says goodbye to her son. “We had the song play on repeat. It was going on all day long,” Zhao says. “It became almost like a chant.”

Its stirring, melancholic melody seems to take effect once again, as Buckley, lying on a bench, arches her back in a self-possessed posture. “Gorgeous,” Zhao says. The ghost smiles, almost imperceptibly, her body as fluid as her long white dress, ready to surrender to the inevitable, ready for her last bow.

Hair by Jenny Cho at A-Frame Agency; makeup by Nina Park for Chanel Beauty at Kalpana; manicure by Emi Kudo for Dior Le Baume at A-Frame Agency. Set design by Colin Donahue.

Production: Rosco Production; executive Producer: Kaitlyn Fong; Producers: Anneliese Kristedja, Hannah Murphy; Production Manager: Alison Yardley; Dreamwork Coach: Kim Gillingham; Chief Lighting Technician: Jesse Wine; Assistant Chief Lighting Technicians: Jordan Parhad, Danny Carillo; Key Grip: Ethan Mutz; Grip: Hank Bolton; Photo Assistant: Bono Melendrez; Digital Technician: Nick Fish; Fashion Assistants: Kaley Azambuja, Lauren Marron; Production Assistants: Tyler "Moose" Krupski, Eli Cash, Laphale Black, Ana Pleta; makeup Assistant: Yukari Bush; Set Assistants: Marko Pelic, Aaron Bobrow; Tailor: Irina Tshartaryan at Susie’s Custom Designs; Special thanks to Million Dollar Theater.