Andrew Scott, our guest on this episode of The Hollywood Reporter’s Awards Chatter podcast, is an extraordinary Irish stage and screen actor who has been described by the New York Times as “always captivating … one of our most reliably excellent actors … an actor of unusual sensitivity and verve … [and] a human Swiss Army knife.”
Scott, who began acting as a child and has been working consistently for more than 30 years — he had a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it role in Saving Private Ryan — is best known for his performances on the British TV shows Sherlock (as the titular detective’s nemesis Moriarty) and Fleabag (as the priest with whom the eponymous free-spirit falls in love) and films Spectre (as Bond villain ‘C’) and All of Us Strangers (as a gay man who reconnects with his dead parents), as well as on the American limited series Ripley (as the con-man himself).
But he is about to become even better known for Elsinore, Simon Stone’s film that recently premiered at the Telluride Film Festival, in which he gives a performance for the ages as Chariots of Fire actor Ian Charleson during the final chapter of his life, when he was diagnosed with AIDS but refused to give up a gig playing Hamlet at the National Theatre. The response to Scott’s performance in the film, which Focus Features will release on Nov. 20, has been so tremendous that there is already significant chatter that he could become the first out gay person to ever win an acting Oscar.
Over the course of a conversation at the LA offices of The Hollywood Reporter, the 49-year-old discussed how a lisp led him to acting; the impact on his career, or lack thereof, of his decision to publicly come out as gay in a 2013 interview; how he approached the moment immediately after Fleabag, when he could have taken his career in very different directions; why he was so drawn to the story of Charleson that he signed on not only to play the man in Elsinore but also to produce the film, and how he tackled the massive challenges of both jobs; plus more.
Here are a few excerpts from the interview, some lightly edited for clarity and brevity…
On coming out publicly in a 2013 interview and the impact, or lack thereof, on his career…
“I’d come out, as I say, privately. And because I hadn’t had a lot of scrutiny, I didn’t really need to think about coming out publicly because nobody was interested, frankly. Nobody was asking me. So you think, ‘Well, I’m not going to force this,’ because I kind of closed doors for myself potentially at the time if I needed to.
But then I had worked on Sherlock and it was a very, very big show around 2011, 2012 and I was getting more scrutiny, and I just didn’t like the feeling of omission in some ways. I’d made the film Pride and I was very proud of Pride. I wanted to talk about it before that movie came out. When I was talking about Pride, I wasn’t making it about me, so I wanted to have that sort of done.
I was playing a Russian spy in something [Legacy], so I basically crowbarred that into the conversation [“I started looking at Vladimir Putin videos on YouTube. But then Putin introduced anti-gay legislation this summer – so, being a gay person, I switched to Rudolf Nureyev videos instead”]. I shoehorned it, I absolutely did, to sort of get it out with it, because I didn’t want to make a big sort of announcement about it, because it didn’t feel necessary.
It’s funny to think about it now because it feels like another lifetime ago, but there were a couple of things in maybe some of the gay press where people said, ‘Oh, he’s come out,’ but nothing major. No fallout. No fallout whatsoever. In fact, I would say the opposite. It’s funny. I always say that it was incredibly good because after that — I don’t know if these things are related in any way, but after that, things really started to go really well career-wise for me, for the things that I wanted. And I don’t know, I can’t imagine that not feeling comfortable in your own self for whatever reason, or not carrying around that kind of burden for some reason, I can’t imagine that that can’t have some sort of effect on your acting.”
On his experience playing a Bond villain in Sam Mendes’ Spectre…
“I think I allowed myself I think to be somewhat intimidated by the James Bond-yness of the whole thing. I guess I feel like there were things that I could have pushed or suggested. And I knew Sam really well, but it’s that feeling as an actor — I think the most important thing that you should have on a set is a level of comfort that you’re able to say, ‘What about this and what about that?’ And that you feel like you have the time. And I don’t think I felt I was, in some ways, worthy enough, when I look at it now, to push that a little bit. I don’t know, I had a great time. There were incredible actors in that — my great friend Ben Whishaw and Ralph Fiennes and Daniel [Craig], who I know and love and have worked with since, all incredibly kind people. And I love Sam. What I learned is that it doesn’t matter what the budget of the movie is, what the audience want to see is aliveness and daring and flair. I think that was a very important thing for me to learn.”
On the post-Fleabag moment…
“Opportunities were coming up and I felt like, ‘Oh, I know what I want to do.’ I wasn’t like, ‘Oh, God.’ I wasn’t impressionable. I wasn’t an ingenue at that stage. Also, do you know what I think was kind of helpful? We had that extraordinary awards season of success with Fleabag all January and February and March, and then at the end of that month COVID happened, and then all of a sudden the world shut down. It made me appreciate how much I love what I do, because of course so many productions were shut down, and just that thing of going from really the most busy international time of my life to the quietest time of my life. For so many people it was like that, but it was jarring, and it gave me time to regroup.”
On getting professional and personal opportunities that Ian Charleson, as a gay actor, never did…
“Nobody wants to be rewarded or awarded for anything other than their work — you don’t want to be a token — but Ian and his predecessors weren’t invited to do the work. They were unable to contribute [more] to an industry that they could have been very useful in, and they could have had the facility to do, and that must have been so painful and difficult to have to choose between one thing or the other. And I thought when I was starting out that that was my fate too, but bit by bit, for whatever reason, that’s turned out not to be the case. And that’s why it’s so important for me to say not just that I managed to scrape by, but actually that I’ve been able to thrive in this situation, and that feels genuinely extraordinary.
In some ways, I hope it becomes less of a special thing for actors in the future … I’m an optimist … The war is never over, but we’re moving towards what I believe is a very positive place where we understand that in a garden, a wild garden, there are lots of different textures and perfumes and color of all description, and that’s what makes the garden beautiful, and there’s no need to separate it in a way that we think we might have in the past.”
