This Sunday, the curtain falls on the Toronto film festival, the last of the three big autumn showcases – alongside Venice and Telluride – that are launchpads for award campaigns. And as the dust settles on the red carpets, one name rises above the others as destined for sure-fire glory: Andrew Scott. The Irish actor, 50 next month, is now not only considered a lock for a leading actor Oscar nomination but almost certain to take the prize next spring.
Should he win, he will become the first out gay actor to do so in the Academy’s almost 100-year history. If that’s a fact that seems astonishing today, it would have felt an inevitability in 1989, when the film for which Scott has been so praised is set. In Elsinore, he plays Ian Charleson, the dashing Scottish star of films including Chariots of Fire and Gandhi.
Charleson had been given his first role three years before Chariots by Derek Jarman, but excised it from his CV (leading to a lifelong rift, depicted in Elsinore). Muting his sexuality was then considered essential in the pursuit of stardom. Yet despite such curation – and his undeniable talents – Charleson never reached the level of fame he felt he deserved.
Until December 1989, that is, when he took over the role of Hamlet from Daniel Day-Lewis at the National Theatre, despite secretly having Aids. His performance was reckoned to be one of the finest ever, and he died six weeks after the final show, aged 40. His family then went public with his diagnosis and sexuality: this was the first celebrity death in the UK attributed to Aids, and did much to boost awareness and acceptance.
The film is a passion project for Scott, who also produced and rallied together funding alongside Stephen Beresford, screenwriter of Scott’s big-screen breakthrough, 2014’s Pride, another real-life story of 1980s gay history, about an unlikely alliance of LGBTQ+ activists and striking Welsh miners. Scott was galvanised to get Elsinore off the ground by the death of his mother, Nora, in 2023. Born in Dublin in 1976, Scott shot his first film aged 17 before studying drama at Trinity College Dublin and moving to London aged 22.
Despite playing gay characters, he, too, was advised to remain silent on his own sexuality, to avoid pigeonholing. Speaking after Elsinore’s Toronto premiere last week, Scott said such a climate gave him “a horrible feeling that I perhaps wasn’t going to be able to speak a language I was desperate to speak”. He came out publicly in 2013 aged 37, shortly after his small-screen breakthrough as Moriarty opposite Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock.
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