Andrew Scott is the prince of Telluride.
There are performances that feel like a reckoning, and performances that feel like a resurrection. Andrew Scott’s work in “Elsinore,” which had its world premiere Friday night at the Telluride Film Festival, is somehow both — a great actor playing a great actor as the curtain starts to fall, and refusing to let it.
Directed by Simon Stone and written by Stephen Beresford, “Elsinore” tells the true story of Ian Charleson, the Scottish “Chariots of Fire” star who spent the last year of his life playing Hamlet at London’s National Theatre as AIDS was quietly taking his life. He died in 1990 at 40. His Hamlet — hailed then as one of the finest of its generation — became a farewell disguised as a role.
The casting is too perfect to be accidental. Scott is himself a celebrated London Hamlet, here playing a man whose Hamlet was his last act of defiance. “Elsinore” is, at its heart, a love letter to actors — to the craft as vocation, to the courage of standing in the light when the body is failing. And a milestone waits inside the role. No openly gay man has ever won the Oscar for best actor, and Scott could very well become the first.
Make no mistake, this is the role of Scott’s career and it lands him toward the forefront of a best actor conversation he has been circling for years. He has never been Oscar-nominated — a fact that curdled into open disdain when the Academy passed over his shattering turn in “All of Us Strangers.” “Elsinore” is the correction: he captures Charleson’s wit, vanity, terror and grace inside the same breath and in the final stretch, he nails Hamlet’s readiness measured against a dying man’s own — the sustained high-wire work voters still see behind their eyes in January.
