Andrew Scott had played Hamlet 150 times, each production clocking in at three hours and 45 minutes. He’d learned all 1,500 lines to perform at every show. He’d mastered the physical demands of the final-act swordfight and waded through the complex, volatile emotional journey that led into it. “You’re dealing with the very essence of the biggest question we have,” as Scott puts it now. “What happens to us when we die?”
The New York Times’ Ben Brantley had written of Scott’s performance, “I could see his heart palpitating, and breaking apart, within his chest.”
This was in 2017, when Scott wowed the West End with his take on the Prince of Denmark. Nearly a decade later, the Olivier Award-winning Irish native needed to unlearn how he pulled that off — and start anew. He’d been cast in Elsinore, a dramatic film retelling one of the greatest Hamlet feats in the history of the British theater: When Ian Charleson took on the role while dying of AIDS, ultimately succumbing to the illness 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 says. “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.”
