Andrew Scott Plays Ian Charleson in AIDS Drama 'Elsinore'

Andrew Scott stars as Ian Charleson, the "Chariots of Fire" actor who in 1989 fought to play Hamlet at the National Theatre while battling complications from HIV, in Simon Stone's "Elsinore." Focus Features will release the film in theaters on Friday, November 20.

The fact-based drama has already drawn major acclaim. IndieFilm's Anne Thompson and the audience at the Toronto International Film Festival — where "Elsinore" won an award — have hailed the performance as Scott's next big contending role.

Scott, the Irish actor known to wider audiences as the "Hot Priest" in "Fleabag," has spent the years since working through darker material. In 2023 he delivered a shattering turn in Andrew Haigh's "All of Us Strangers," followed by a one-man performance in the latest staging of "Uncle Vanya," known simply as "Vanya." He then played the slippery title character in the small-screen "Ripley" and took a supporting stint as Richard Rodgers in last year's "Blue Moon."

"Elsinore" posed a different challenge: Scott was not playing Hamlet, but another actor's lifelong dream of the role. And Scott knows Hamlet better than any other character. He once played a three-hour-and-50-minute version of "Hamlet" eight times a week.

"Once you play that part, everything else is a walk in the park," Scott told Thompson at this year's Telluride Film Festival. "That's the great training of it."

The harder task, Scott said, was unlearning his own interpretation of Hamlet and applying it to what Charleson endured during rehearsals and performances of material that carried a different kind of resonance for a dying man.

"That was difficult to unlearn," Scott said, "what my version of it would be. And to try and imagine when you're talking about 'to be or not to be, to live or to die,' when you feel like it could be a matter of weeks or months before that really is 'the undiscovered country from which no traveler returns.'"

The ensemble cast includes Olivia Colman, Billie Piper, Johnny Flynn, Luke Thompson, David Dawson, Matthew Beard, Joe Locke, Monica Dolan, Georgie Glen, Sadie Soverall, Adeel Akhtar, Dickie Beau, Kadiff Kirwan, Juliet Stevenson, and Peter Mullan.

The film's first trailer has now been released, ahead of the November 20 theatrical debut that will test whether Scott's festival momentum carries into the awards season.