Joe Harper (the alter ego of Sir Kenneth Branagh) turns down a role in a big science fiction trilogy to return to his company to play Hamlet. Branagh was originally considered for the role of the younger Obi-wan Kenobi in Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (1999).
According to writer and director Kenneth Branagh, "one of the greatest pleasures I had was when we had a screening on a Sunday morning in the West End, and most of the crew and cast came, including Joan Collins. I'd paid for the film myself with the money I made from Frankenstein (1994), and we sold it at a profit. The books were completely open. And as they left the cinema that morning, we had all the envelopes laid out and we gave everybody a check, including Joan Collins, who nearly fell over. She said, 'I've been in the business for quite a long time, and this has never happened.' She opened it and she said, 'F**king hell!' Because it was not inconsiderable."
The film was shot in only 21 days.
Michael Maloney (Joe Harper), Richard Briers (Henry Wakefield) and Nicholas Farrell (Tom Newman) all later appeared in the writer and director Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet (1996). They played Laertes, Polonius and Horatio respectively. Furthermore, Maloney played Rosencrantz in Franco Zeffirelli's Hamlet (1990) and Farrell provided the voice of Hamlet in Hamlet (1992).