by Andrew Scott was “really excited, shocked and surprised” to win the Best Actor statuette at the 67th Evening Standard Awards last weekend for his performance in Simon Stephens’ Vanya, a one-man adaptation of Chekhov’s play. “Our Wessex Grove producers decided to put something a bit crazy and not necessarily commercial in a West End theatre,” the 47-year-old says when we speak.
“And that was In fact It’s surprising that so many people have come to see it because it’s an unusual idea and requires a lot of hard work on the part of the public. But there were people who said they had come from Venezuela and New Zealand to see him.”
Many younger fans of Scott’s television performances as Moriarty in Sherlock, or Hot Priest in Fleabag, also came to see him play eight different characters, male and female, of different ages and social backgrounds, in Vanya.
Deprived of the usual camaraderie of an acting troupe, he chatted with many of those fans at the stage door and considers his television fame “absolutely a blessing.” However, doing eight shows a week almost killed him, he says, and his body “collapsed” after the last night.
The show proved to be a virtuoso display of acting skill, but it ran the risk of seeming like a gimmick or an exercise in vanity. “Yes, exactly,” she says. “There had to be a reason for it beyond the opportunity for the actor.” And he explains that the concept, and the justification for it, arose from an error.
Stephens had written a “fairly standard version of the play that would have a regular-sized cast” and he, Scott and director Sam Yates were reading it aloud to find which character would best suit Scott. By accident he ended up playing the central character and his nemesis at the same time, arguing with himself.
“It became clear that all of these characters think that their particular experience is unique to them, but in reality their pain and their vulnerability are very, very similar. So the idea that we all have multitudes, people who are seemingly opposites of each other, actually embodied by the same actor… I think it speaks to our idea now in this current culture where we’re all obsessed with identity, but in reality “We are all much more similar to each other than we allow ourselves to believe.”
As Stephens pointed out, when you write a play, you play all the characters you have in your head. And turning Vanya into a one-man show shook audiences out of what can be a weary familiarity with Chekhov. Scott says he and director Robert Icke had to find analogous techniques for his Hamlet at the Almeida in 2017. “How do you unlearn something that’s incredibly famous?” he says.
Hamlet does not know that his father’s ghost is going to appear and then disappear: he does not know how his uncle will react to a dramatized version of his fratricide. Icke said that whenever Scott felt that he was taking scenes for granted, he had to press the “famous play buzzer” in his mind to reinstate his performance.
Despite his thriving film career, Scott is a creature of the theater. Born in Dublin to an art teacher mother and a father who worked in an employment agency, he took drama classes to overcome teenage shyness, dropped out of art school to study acting, and then dropped out of drama school to perform at the Abbey Theater from Dublin. “I love the idea of adults voluntarily going to the movies, sitting in the dark and saying, ‘I wish you would tell me a story,’ knowing it’s not true,” he smiles.
She moved to London at age 22, where her first major stage role was in Conor McPherson’s Dublin Carol. Simon Stephens saw that play and ended up writing Sea Wall, Birdland and now Vanya for Scott. Other theater highlights included David Hare’s The Vertical Hour for Sam Mendes in New York in 2006, and the premiere of Mike Bartlett’s Cock opposite Ben Whishaw at the Royal Court in 2009.
After appearing in Noel Coward’s Design for Living at the Old Vic in 2009, he returned as writer and venue as the monstrously self-absorbed matinee idol Gary Essendine in Coward’s Present Laughter: that performance earned him his first Evening Standard Best Actor award.
He was unable to attend this year’s ceremony because the end of the US actors’ strike meant he suddenly had to fly to Los Angeles to resume promotional duties for Andrew Haigh’s film All of us Strangers. It is a meditation on loneliness and regret; Scott’s character lives in an isolated tower and begins a tentative relationship with the only other resident, played by fellow Best Actor nominee Paul Mescal.
Meanwhile, he revisits the ghosts of his parents (Claire Foy and Jamie Bell), who died in a car accident 30 years earlier, reliving as an adult the experience of talking to them as a teenager.
“It’s incredibly personal for me and for Andrew, who brought so much vulnerability that he really didn’t want to act or not tell the truth,” Scott says. “We shot it at his family’s house, which was extraordinary. I thought, my God, when you lost a tooth you would have put it under the pillow that sound engineer is eating his Pret A Manger sandwich on right now. I felt that somehow it had to be a kind of marriage between our two stories, even though I never met Andrew’s parents and he never met mine.”
Scott came out publicly as gay in 2013 and says that even though his parents were and are loving and understanding, coming out is always difficult.
“A more common reaction than extreme acceptance or extreme rejection is that your parents, through love, may say insulting or clumsy things,” she says. “Accidental cruelty, I call it. I don’t think it’s just an experience for gay people. Within families, because we want them to see us, when they say things that make you feel invisible, it moves you.”
In an interview to mark his recent announcement as GQ’s Man of the Year, he said friends in the industry had advised him to remain silent about his sexuality. “I would say that being authentic and making the decision to be authentic was the best thing for my career,” he says, but he has always been cautious about being defined by his sexuality and keeps his private life off limits: “I feel like I have other attributes that I am more proud of than my sexuality. Because as I always say, it is not a defect in my character but it is not a virtue either” (in fact he has told me this in the past, later adding that being gay “is not a skill like playing the banjo”).
However, he now describes himself as “a bi-coastal practitioner. “I love London but I miss the sea in Dublin and I go to see my parents as much as I can.” Likewise, if he is too far from London, he misses multiculturalism and the arts.
“I feel very passionately that London theater can be the best in the world because there is something about our taste, even in commercial theatre, which is actually a bit left of centre,” he says. “It just has a bit of an edge and there’s a really sophisticated audience here.” Do you expect a new government next year that will take the arts seriously? “Absolutely.”
The Netflix series Ripley, in which he appears as the charming psychopath played by Patricia Highsmith, will finally premiere this year (it was largely filmed under lock and key). But what’s next for the man who played Hamlet and the Hot Priest, Moriarty and eight different characters in Vanya? “Honestly, I don’t know,” he says. “I think maybe I’ve acted too much in the last few years… Oh, but I just did an action movie with Cameron Diaz, which was a lot of fun.” Now there is versatility.
The 67th Evening Standard Theater Awards, presented by Lord Lebedev and Ian McKellen, took place at Claridge’s on Sunday 19 November.
