How Andrew Scott Took on the Role of a Lifetime in ‘Elsinore’

Andrew Scott had played Hamlet 150 times, each production clocking in at three hours and 45 minutes. He’d learned all 1,500 lines to perform at every show. He’d mastered the physical demands of the final-act sw...

August 31, 2026

Andrew Scott had played Hamlet 150 times, each production clocking in at three hours and 45 minutes. He’d learned all 1,500 lines to perform at every show. He’d mastered the physical demands of the final-act swordfight and waded through the complex, volatile emotional journey that led into it. “You’re dealing with the very essence of the biggest question we have,” as Scott puts it now. “What happens to us when we die?” 

The New York Times’ Ben Brantley had written of Scott’s performance, “I could see his heart palpitating, and breaking apart, within his chest.”

This was in 2017, when Scott wowed the West End with his take on the Prince of Denmark. Nearly a decade later, the Olivier Award-winning Irish native needed to unlearn how he pulled that off — and start anew. He’d been cast in Elsinore, a dramatic film retelling one of the greatest Hamlet feats in the history of the British theater: When Ian Charleson took on the role while dying of AIDS, ultimately succumbing to the illness less than two months after his final performance.

“When you’re talking about ‘to be or not to be,’ ‘do I live or do I die’ — Ian is not talking about that as an almost. It was an inevitability at that stage, that he was going to die,” Scott says. “The idea that Ian was doing this when he was so sick is still, to my mind, just completely mind-blowing. And his decision to do it was just incredibly courageous.” 

And so Scott steps into those bold shoes in Elsinore, which will screen at various festivals, including Toronto and London, before hitting theaters on November 20. He delivers a totally unique, equally searing Hamlet in character as Charleson, while also playing a defiant artist facing down the end of his life. He’s an out gay actor portraying a gay actor who came up in a time when being open could mean career suicide. And he’s a credited producer on a movie for the very first time.

“This film is so much about everything in my life — I’ve spent my life in the theater,” says Scott, who’s made his name onscreen in TV series like Sherlock and Fleabag and in the critically lauded 2023 film All of Us Strangers. “And being a gay actor, it’s still so moving to me that I get the opportunity to play a part that Ian and his contemporaries would not have gotten while they were working actors.

“I wanted people to be able to understand that he was trying to live — it’s not about fetishizing his death,” Scott continues. “He was so full of life and fun, and he did this extraordinary thing.”

**

Charleson died at age 40 but still left behind an impressive body of work. The Scottish star broke out for his appealing turn as an Olympian-con-missionary in 1981’s Chariots of Fire, and is one of a handful of actors to have starred in back-to-back Oscar winners for best picture, having played the Anglican priest Charlie Andrews in Gandhi the next year. By the time of his AIDS diagnosis, though, his career had stalled. Then Daniel Day-Lewis abruptly withdrew from the National Theatre’s 1989 staging of Hamlet — later citing emotional distress — which led director Richard Eyre (played in Elsinore by Johnny Flynn) to seek Charleson out as a replacement.

“The story of that last year of Ian’s life is sort of legendary in London theater now,” says screenwriter Stephen Beresford (Pride). Charleson was advised by his doctor, the pioneering Margaret Johnson (played by Olivia Colman), that the demands of Hamlet would be far too much for anyone as ill as he had become. Yet he did it, splitting his days between treatment at the hospital clinic and rehearsals with his cast.

“I was just astonished by this miracle of human strength…that was his way of remaining utterly connected to his purpose and his identity right up until the end,” says Elsinore director Simon Stone (The Dig). “There are stories of filmmakers who have died on film sets, who make their last movie and then disappear into the great beyond. There’s something so meaningful about that idea, that you die doing what you love and that you also get to write the narrative of your end.”

As a younger actor, Scott was often likened to Charleson. Elsinore evolved organically between him, Stone, and Beresford, who’ve all worked fluidly between stage and screen. They batted around ideas in a WhatsApp group chat called “The Charleson Chaps” to nail down the core of what they intended to say. They wanted to tell a story of human resilience. They wanted to capture the miracle of queer community. They wanted to honestly examine the experience of a visible, closeted actor in the ‘80s. They wanted to find joy alongside the heartbreak, triumph alongside the stark reality.  

As the face of the thing, Scott would need to embody that mission. He lost significant weight and buried himself into the role. “We knew it would be really special if he left it all out on the field, if he didn’t spare himself or us anything and honestly went into the gamut of emotions that someone must feel, going through what Ian was going through,” Stone says of his star. “There’s this spirit of Ian that has been handed down, and Andrew’s managed to catch it in the ether. I’m convinced that their spirits have been whispering to each other because it feels like he’s possessed in that performance.”

“I’ve known Andrew a long time, and I knew him when he was playing Hamlet. I would see him afterwards coming off stage like he’d been dragged behind the back of a lorry for five hours,” Beresford adds. “And that’s important — that an actor who’s been through the Everest of Hamlet understands what it’s like to play it while you are sick, to put yourself through what that was.”

Charleson’s inner circle from that time was interviewed by Beresford and others to accurately capture his world. His actual best friend, David Rintoul, plays the Ghost in Elsinore’s imagined production of his Hamlet; Rintoul had actually starred in Scott’s 2017 show too, as had the Olivier-winning Juliet Stevenson — who’s also here, again the Gertrude to Scott’s tortured Prince. Scott had similarly worked with Flynn and Colman before, as well as Billie Piper, who’s magnetic as the famed casting director Patsy Pollack, who nursed Charleson in his last days. 

“It’s a slightly different love story, really, at the center of the film, because it’s very true of a lot of gay men, particularly at that time, that the people who nursed and took care of them and supported them were friends — and very often female friends,” Beresford says. 

“We needed somebody who is both theatrical and sexy and has got that enormous gigantic heart — and Billie is one of the greats,” Scott adds. “Every single person that’s involved in the cast is somebody that I have previous connections with, people that I love or that Simon and Stephen have worked with.” This tightness often brought levity to the heavy material, and aided in the execution of one of Elsinore’s more surprising qualities: It’s laced with humor, beginning to (almost) end.

“It was very, very important to me that the film is not a misery memoir,” Beresford says. “It’s how people were here in London during that crisis, and that to me is not accidental. It’s proof of life, a sense of humor, and it’s a defiance — a fist shaken at the problem.”

**

If Elsinore feels a bit traditional in execution, given the radical figure at its center, this was very much by design. In fact: The movie was directly inspired by sports classics like Rocky and The Karate Kid. “We’re living in a very divisive world at the moment, and that level of subdivision creates such loneliness — so the acknowledgement that we all accept each other’s differences is a weirdly radical statement right now,” Stone says. “That very humanist, almost old-fashioned Hollywood message of ‘We’re here for each other’ is something that I felt really drawn to telling in the movie. I studied a lot of ’70s, ’80s, ’90s Hollywood dramas: Seeing how they were structured, you get that sense of cathartic joy at the end of a struggle.”

The sports-movie metaphor was applied most directly to the Hamlet rehearsal scenes, which are cut through the movie with tremendous energy by editor Valerio Bonelli. They were treated by Stone like Rocky’s training montages, filmed almost documentary-style on the fly — which meant, in Scott’s case, he needed to know the play like never before. The approach made perfect sense to the actor: “We didn’t want to represent theater as this polite undertaking that you do, where everybody then goes and has a cocktail,” Scott says. “It’s this extraordinary physical thing that sometimes people aren’t aware of, just how Olympian the task is for theater performers.” 

He learned all seven of the soliloquies to recite them on demand, since Stone would give spontaneous direction to Flynn’s Eyre to then pass on to Scott’s Charleson. “I didn’t want anyone to be checking with Andrew what he was going to do when the cameras rolled,” Stone says. “I wanted him to have the absolute right to do whatever the hell he wanted to do and go wherever the hell he wanted to go.” Through the role, Scott also processed his grief over losing his mother just a year or two earlier. “My mom was my biggest supporter,” he says. “I feel like when you’re doing something for somebody else and you’ve got nothing to lose, it brings something out. I really wanted to get it right.”

The team combed through Hamlet to find passages that most strongly connected to Charleson’s story, aided by Scott’s singular facility with Shakespearean language. “I’ve always been very passionate about the idea that Shakespeare should be understandable, that we should be able to go, ‘Oh, I understand what that means’ — I don’t love the idea of Shakespeare being really high art,” the actor says.

Elsinore goes to great pains not to present Charleson as exceedingly simple, either. “A lot of what’s written about Ian is wonderful, but slightly saintly,” as Beresford puts it. The film asks complex questions about Charleson presenting as straight to maintain his career, as his life refocuses on the queer people in his life, past and present. 

“There was such discrimination around it — it really, really did impact the way that people saw or read or received your work,” Stone says. “He didn’t want to sacrifice any of those roles, and I understand that.” Scott, a three-time Golden Globe and Emmy nominee, publicly came out 13 years ago, and has seen his career flourish in the time since. Elsinore, in turn, felt like a powerful meta subject to bring full circle. 

“In Ian’s time, there were no examples of people who weren’t straight being in the movies — it’s as simple as that, and that’s just the fact of it,” Scott says. “When I made the decision to be open about my sexuality, I remember at the beginning people warning me not to, that there weren’t too many examples. In some ways, I understood that fear. But it’s important for me to say that as soon as I came out, it had nothing but positive effects on my career — I can only speak personally — and I feel very proud and very moved that, while the war is never over, in some ways, we’ve come a long way.”

Stay tuned for more exclusive features on this fall’s biggest festival-bound films.