by Andrew Scott was “delighted, surprised and shocked” when he won the Best Actor statue 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 they would go a little crazy and not need the commercial in the West End Theatre,” says the 47-year-old as we speak.
“And there was Seriously it is surprising that so many people came to see it because it is an unusual idea and requires a lot of hard work from the audience. But people were saying they would come from Venezuela and New Zealand to see it.”
Many younger fans of Scott’s TV performances as Moriarty in Sherlock, or the Hot Priest in Fleabag, also came to see him portray eight different characters, male and female, of different ages and social stations, in Vanya.
He loved the usual camaraderie of body-acting, and spoke to many of those fans at the stage door, and considers his fame on television “an absolute blessing”. But doing eight shows a week alone almost killed him, he says, and his body “collapsed” after last night.
The show was a wonderful display of acting skill, but it felt like a gimmick or a surprise exercise. “Yes, exactly,” he says. “The actor must have a reason rather than an opportunity.” And he explains that the concept, and the justification for it, came about because of a mistake.
Stephens had written “a fairly standard version of the play with a normal-sized cast” and he, Scott and director Sam Yates were reading it out loud to see which character would suit Scott. By accident he ended up playing both the central character and his nemesis, arguing with himself.
“It’s clear that all these characters think their particular experiences are unique to them but in reality their pain and vulnerability is very similar. So the idea that we’re all multitudes, people who seem like they’re against each other, all really embodied by the same actor… I think it speaks to our thinking now in this current culture where We are all obsessed with identity, but in reality we are much more alike than we let ourselves believe.”
As Stephens pointed out, when he is writing a play he is playing all the characters in his head. And when Vanya turned into a solo show, the audience was very excited about the experience that might have tired Chekhov. Scott says he and director Robert Icke had to find analogical techniques for their Hamlet at the Almeida in 2017. “How do you unlearn something that’s famous?” He says.
Hamlet does not know that his father’s ghost will appear and then disappear: he does not know how his uncle will act with a dramatic version of his fratricide. Icke said he should push “the Famous Play Buzzer” in his mind to reset his performance.
Despite his successful screen career, Scott is a creature of the theater. Born in Dublin to an art teacher mother and father who worked in an employment agency, he took drama classes to overcome teenage shyness, left art school to study acting, then retired drama school to perform at the Abbey Theater in Dublin. “I love the idea of adults willingly going into the theater and sitting in the dark and saying ‘I want you to tell me a story’, knowing it’s not true,” he smiled. .
He moved to London at the age of 22, where his first major stage role was in Dublin Carol with Conor McPherson. 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 Royal Court premiere of Mike Bartlett’s Cock opposite Ben Whishaw in 2009.
After appearing in Noel Coward’s Design for Living at the Old Vic in 2009, he returned to both writer and venue as the self-deprecating matinee idol Gary Essendine in Coward’s Present Laughter: winning the This earned him his first Evening Standard Best Actor award.
He was unable to attend this year’s ceremony due to the end of the actors’ strike in America which meant he had to fly to LA suddenly to resume his publicity 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 block 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 that came out to them as a teenager.
“It’s very personal for me, and for Andrew, which added so much vulnerability that I didn’t want to act, or I didn’t want to tell the truth in it,” says Scott. “We shot it at his family’s house, which was great. I thought, God, when you lose a tooth you’d have buried that tooth under that flour that that sound engineer is eating his Pret A Manger sandwich on right now. I somehow felt that it had to be some kind of marriage between our two stories even though I’ve never met Andrew’s parents and he’s never met mine.”
Scott came out publicly as gay in 2013 and says coming out has always been difficult even though his parents were loving and supportive.
“A more common reaction than overwhelming acceptance or overwhelming rejection is that your parents, through love, can say things that are offensive or clumsy,” he says. “I call it accidental cruelty. I don’t think that’s just an experience for gay people. Within families, because we want to be seen, when they say things that make you feel invisible, it affects you.”
In an interview to be announced recently as GQ’s Man of the Year, he said that friends in the industry advised him to keep quiet about his sexuality. “I would say that being authentic, and the decision to be authentic, was the best thing for my career,” he says, but he has always been wary of defining his sexuality, and keeps his private life off limits: “ I think I have other characteristics that I am proud of than my sexuality. Because as I always say it’s not a flaw in my character but it’s not a virtue either” (in fact he has told me this in the past, then adding that being gay is not “a skill like the banjo”) .
However, he now describes himself as a “practicing biocist. I love London but I miss the sea in Dublin and I go to see my family as much as I can.” Similarly, if he is out of London too much he misses multiculturalism and the arts.
“I feel very passionately that London theater can be the best in the world because there’s something about our taste even in commercial theater that’s a bit off-centre,” he says. “It’s just a bit of a front and there’s a very sophisticated audience here.” Does he expect a new government next year that will take the arts seriously? “Indeed.”
The Netflix series Ripley, in which he appears as the beautiful psychopath Patricia Highsmith, is finally coming out this year (it was mostly under wraps). But where else for the man who played Hamlet and the Hot Priest, Moriarty and eight different characters in Vanya? “I honestly don’t know,” he says. “I think maybe I’ve acted a bit too much in the last few years… Oh, but I’ve done an action film with Cameron Diaz, which was really fun.” Now there is flexibility.
The 67th Evening Standard Theater Awards, hosted by Lord Lebedev and Ian McKellen, took place at Claridge’s on Sunday 19 November
