Could Andrew Scott make history?
That is the big question concerning the Irish actor’s towering performance in “Elsinore,” which debuted in Telluride before playing the Toronto International Film Festival. Directed by Simon Stone, the film features Scott as Ian Charleson, a Scottish actor whose career has slowed down since featuring in “Chariots of Fire.” The year is 1989, and when Daniel Day-Lewis walks offstage during a production of “Hamlet” at London’s National Theater, Charleson sees it as an opportunity to show the world what he’s made of as an actor — even as his body is being ravaged by AIDS, and against the advice of his doctor (Olivia Colman), who warns him that the stress could further worsen his health.
As Variety’s Clayton Davis wrote, “The casting is too perfect to be accidental. Scott is himself a celebrated London Hamlet, here playing a man whose Hamlet was his last act of defiance. ‘Elsinore’ is, at its heart, a love letter to actors — to the craft as vocation, to the courage of standing in the light when the body is failing. And a milestone waits inside the role. No openly gay man has ever won the Oscar for best actor, and Scott could very well become the first.”
Scott was widely seen as “snubbed” for his embodiment of Richard Rodgers in “Blue Moon” and the haunted Adam in “All of Us Strangers.”
On Saturday, Sept. 12, Scott took the stage at the Royal Alexandra Theatre to roaring applause as part of TIFF’s “In Conversation” series to discuss his much-heralded turn in “Elsinore” and his storied career. The talk was moderated by Keith Bennie, TIFF’s vice president of public programming.
The talk began with Bennie asking Scott, 49, who was sporting a striking purple jumper, about the internet’s obsession with him.
“I don’t have the internet. I never see it,” he joked, before adding, “It’s actually wild: You never know what feral things people [will say].”
“Elsinore” is the first film Scott has ever produced, so he said it “took a huge amount of encouragement and support and vision from so many people” to bring it to fruition. It was also a very personal project for Scott, who is openly gay and has been acting in theater since the ‘90s, including his aforementioned turn as Hamlet in 2017.
“You go through stages with it, and the film is so incredibly personal for me, which is the reason why I chose to produce this one,” he explained. “It’s set in the theater and about the representation of gay actors in the ‘90s, and it’s about family. So many things that I really relate to.”
Scott made his acting debut as a teenager in “Korea,” an Irish film that premiered at TIFF in 1995. And it was a formative experience for him, since he was given a crash course in how to conduct himself on a film set by watching his co-star, screen veteran Donal Donnelly, who led with authority but treated people with dignity and respect.
“Depressing. No, it was extraordinary. I was 17, and it was the first film I’d ever made,” offered Scott. “I learned how to be on a set because [Donnelly] was incredibly kind and fun with everybody… He wasn’t in any way cruel or anything like that.”
When Scott was a child, he had a speech impediment, which, in a roundabout way, is how he “fell in love with acting.”
“When I was a kid, I had a speech impediment — I had a very strong sort of lisp— so I had to go to elocution lessons at seven or eight,” he shared. “It had a drama section to it where you could improvise in front of the other kids.” Performing poetry and monologues in front of a crowd, however small, “amplified something that was dormant” in him.
At one point during the talk, Bennie shared a scene of Scott’s priest acting alongside Phoebe Waller-Bridge in the second season of “Fleabag,” which became an internet sensation and earned his character the nickname “The Hot Priest.”
“If you had got a script that said, ‘The Hot Priest,’ you’d be like, ‘This is dodgy,’” joked Scott. “It was just called ‘The Priest’ and then the internet took over.”
Scott, however, was immensely proud of “The Hot Priest” craze in the sense that it helped ease some of his own anxieties about whether the audience would accept a gay actor in a role as a woman’s love interest.
“I guess there was a fear that I wouldn’t be able to get cast in those roles. That’s what everybody said,” he confessed. “But I knew, because when I did plays, that the people that were waiting at the stage door, they knew my sexuality and they did not care.”
He continued: “I feel very proud that that was quite a big moment because people were like, ‘The actor is gay. Whoa!’ And it is like this idea that the audience is stupid. We go to see ‘Batman,’ and it’s like, ‘Oh my god! He is not a bat?’”
And if you don’t like Scott in those types of roles, that’s on you.
“That’s just prejudice,” said Scott. “And we won’t cater to those people, or I’m certainly not going to.”
About an hour in, the talk swung back to “Elsinore,” a film — and performance — that people will be talking about throughout awards season.
“It’s about how we use our time, and he was enormously fun, attractive, beautiful, amazingly gifted actor,” Scott said of playing Charleson. “And the film is about the support that he got and the courage that he displayed. The reason I was so attracted to it, I think, is because it doesn’t end well for any of us, and quality of time is what he chose… I know what an Olympian, absolutely exhausting task that is [to play Hamlet]. I did it 150 times… The idea that he did it when he was so unwell, it always just gets me.”
Scott, who got choked up while discussing the film, also lamented how difficult it was for Charleson to act, or even exist, at a time when gay men, particularly those with HIV/AIDS, were being viciously discriminated against.
“There weren’t any gay actors — for no reason,” he remarked. “That was taken away from them.”
