Andrew Scott Opens Up About Playing an Out Gay Theater Actor in New Biopic: ‘So Much About Everything in My Life’

The Irish actor portrays Ian Charleson in ‘Elsinore’, a biopic about the actor’s final ‘Hamlet’ performance while living with AIDS.

NEED TO KNOW

• Andrew Scott plays Ian Charleson, a gay actor who performed Hamlet while living with AIDS in the 1980s
• The film explores Charleson’s courage, career challenges and the stigma surrounding sexuality in the theater industry
• Scott said the role resonates deeply with his own experiences as a gay actor and his love for theater

Andrew Scott knows what it means to be consumed by Hamlet.

In 2017, the Irish actor, 49, played the Prince of Denmark 150 times in London’s West End, with each production running three hours and 45 minutes. Nearly a decade later, Scott returned to Hamlet for Elsinore, a new film about one of the most extraordinary chapters in the play’s performance history: the 1989 production at London’s National Theatre, when Scottish actor Ian Charleson took on the title role while privately dying of AIDS.

Charleson, who was 40, died 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 told The Hollywood Reporter in a n interview published on Monday, Aug. 31. “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.”

In Elsinore, Scott plays Charleson as he prepares for Hamlet while living with AIDS. Charleson was also a gay actor working at a time when being open about his sexuality could tarnish his career. Scott, who publicly came out in an interview with The Independent in November 2013, said that part of Charleson’s story is particularly meaningful to him.

“This film is so much about everything in my life — I’ve spent my life in the theater,” he said. “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.”

Scott added that he also wanted the film to emphasize Charleson’s life rather than reduce him to his illness.

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

Never miss a story — sign up for PEOPLE’s free daily newsletter to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from celebrity news to compelling human interest stories.

Charleson had already built an impressive career before his AIDS diagnosis. He starred in two Best Picture Oscar winners, playing an Olympian-turned-missionary in Chariots of Fire and as Anglican priest Charlie Andrews in Gandhi.

By the time Charleson was diagnosed with AIDS, his career had stalled. In 1989, Daniel Day-Lewis abruptly withdrew from the National Theatre’s production of Hamlet, later citing emotional distress. Director Richard Eyre, played by Johnny Flynn in Elsinore, turned to Charleson as Day-Lewis’ replacement.

“The story of that last year of Ian’s life is sort of legendary in London theater now,” screenwriter Stephen Beresford told THR.

Scott, who immersed himself physically and emotionally in the role, also had to approach Hamlet differently this time around.

“We didn’t want to represent theater as this polite undertaking that you do, where everybody then goes and has a cocktail,” Scott said. “It’s this extraordinary physical thing that sometimes people aren’t aware of, just how Olympian the task is for theater performers.”

The process also coincided with Scott’s own grief over the loss of his mother a year or two earlier.

“My mom was my biggest supporter,” he shared. “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 filmmakers also wanted to explore the choices Charleson made around his sexuality and career. For Scott, the subject has a clear connection to his own experience.

“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 said. “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.”

He added, “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.”

Elsinore hits theaters on Nov. 20.

Read the full article here