Patrick Stewart actually first played Claudius in an uncut BBC special series of every Shakespeare play, with Derek Jacobi as Hamlet. Amusingly, he'd go on to also play Claudius in Kenneth Branagh's film.

If nothing else, this is a far better modernization than the Ethan Hawke film with the ghost walking into a Pepsi One machine, and poor Julia Stiles having to try to convey everything Ophelia's feeling with almost all her lines cut.