“Hey Joe, it's Andrew Scott here, hope you're well. I just wanted to say I'm also wearing a couple of gold rings that my mother, who died really recently, always wore. They remind me of her. One of them she made herself, so, I just wanted to say that I'm wearing that so I have her with me on the evening as well. That's important. I just wanted to let you know.” [Esquire for the Met Gala]
Since Andrew is taking some well deserved time away from the public at the moment, let's revisit (or visit for the first time, if you're new here) this stunning photoshoot from Mr. Porter, October 2019, when he was doing press for Modern Love and his Ripley casting had just been announced (yes, it's taken that long for it to come out).
Mr Andrew Scott’s big brown eyes are open wide in amused disbelief. “That was not an Irish accent,” he says in his musical Irish brogue. “That was a West Country accent.” How embarrassing for an interviewer who thought to connect with her subject by lightly mocking Mr Ed Sheeran’s – again – not-Irish accent in his cameo in Mr Scott’s episode of Amazon’s upcoming anthology series, Modern Love. Panic sets in. “It’s all right,” he says, soothingly. “It’s all right. Accents are such funny things.”
You know what else is a funny thing? Sitting with Fleabag’s “hot priest” – 2019’s most unexpected sex symbol – in a wine bar in Bermondsey, southeast London, talking about vulnerability, romcoms and love stories. Or, to take another angle: sitting across the table from the deranged Jim Moriarty and letting him pick out a rosé. That tickles, too. Having Hamlet express the need for a mini-break in, he doesn’t know, Copenhagen? Amsterdam, maybe? Surreal.
But actually, Mr Scott, who is wearing what can only be described as a modified sweatsuit (shorts and a zip-up sweatshirt, no shirt beneath) after our photoshoot isn’t funny funny. No, Mr Scott is serious: reserved and contemplative, but with the energy of a theatre nerd who, every once in a while, rests his head in his hands, cupping his fingers around his eyes to form blinkers while he thinks about a question you’ve just asked. In this quiet wine bar. He’s not an evil murderer, an agent of a shadowy organisation, or an overly excited (wink) cleric. He’s just a nice guy who sympathises about the difficulty of parsing the subtleties of the many accents in the British Commonwealth (and beyond).
Mr Scott is still hot off his run in Fleabag, even though the show ran from March to April of this year. A few weeks ago, he received a GQ Men of the Year Award, and just a few weeks after that, was in Los Angeles at the Emmy Awards where Fleabag cleaned up, winning three awards.
Of course, this is not Mr Scott’s big break. He’s been in the business since moving from Dublin to London 20 years ago to pursue acting. His dad worked in employment, helping young people find the right careers and his mother was an art teacher. “They were definitely into following your passion and doing that for the rest of your life,” he says. “Rather than, ‘You should be a lawyer,’ or whatever the fuck.”
And this has been a year for Mr Scott’s passions. Aside from Fleabag, and an episode of Black Mirror that landed on Netflix this June, he’s making a poignant appearance in the aforementioned _Modern Love,_ which will drop all at once on 18 October. A series of discreet episodes, each one features its own starry cast (Mr Dev Patel, Mr John Slattery, Ms Tina Fey, Ms Anne Hathaway and, of course, Mr Ed Sheeran, among others), based on the much-loved New York Times column from which it takes its name. Mr Scott’s episode, which co-stars Ms Olivia Cooke and Mr Brandon Kyle Goodman, is loosely based on an early column written by the sex-and-relationships writer Mr Dan Savage about the unusual experience he and his partner had with adoption. “It’s just a really sweet little story. It’s not about a romantic relationship,” he says, (many Modern Love entries are not). “It’s simply about the relationships between people.”
He’s also currently filming in Cardiff for the BBC TV series of His Dark Materials. And maybe there’s a Marvel movie in his future? “Oh, fuck. Completely false,” he says. “Someone said, ‘Are you going to be in a thing?’ I said, ‘No,’ and I said, ‘There have been discussions.’ And it’s like ‘Andrew Scott has been in discussions.’”
That’s what happens when suddenly everyone wants you – to use Twitter parlance – to run them over with your car. The Priest, unlike his other characters, was a sex symbol, one that wears the hell (forgive me, Father) out of a cassock. But who could be surprised that Mr Scott turned a priest into the “Hot Priest” simply by saying “kneel”? (If you don’t know what that means, stop reading now, watch the show, come back.) In fact, he has been making words positively drip with meaning for nearly a decade.
Consider Moriarty, the insane criminal puppet master Mr Scott played for six years across four seasons of the BBC’s Sherlock, opposite Mr Benedict Cumberbatch in the titular role. This particular Moriarty – Holmes’ famous nemesis, who has also been played by Messrs Orson Welles, John Huston and Sir Laurence Olivier – is indelible and utterly idiosyncratic. “If you’re going to do it, I don’t see there’s any point in doing it without putting your own stamp on it. I never look at any previous incarnations,” says Mr Scott. The result of this thinking – in Sherlock, at least – was a Moriarty who is all sing-song eeriness, molten physicality, and questionable cutaway collars. “He was quite theatrical; he was grotesque, sort of the archetypal villain,” he says. Archetypal, indeed: the role propelled him into the world of maniacal superfandom. He might not have received a dedicated stan nomenclature like his co-star (ahem, “Cumberbitches”), but the role made Mr Scott a household name.
Of course, establishing yourself as adept at playing evil incarnate probably leads to people wanting to cast you in more Moriarty-like roles. “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yep, yeah,” he says, six times. “Yeah, exactly right,” (one more). “I turned down a lot. The shadow of that character took over for a little while.” The craze got to be so tiresome that he asked the interviewer for a recent profile in The Guardian not to ask him about Moriarty at all (two years after he last appeared in the series). But now he sees a bigger picture, understands how being the object of abject obsession can be a good thing. “I think to answer your questions,” he says, tapping his fingers on the table, “it’s been really good fun.”
Mr Scott demurs when asked what it’s like to be the quencher of many thirsts on the internet. “People don’t say that to me. People don’t say, ‘Oh my God...” He shakes his head and trails off, perhaps in horror of what fans could be saying to him. It’s a little hard to believe that he wouldn’t be mobbed as he walks down the street. After all, one major British publication declared that Fleabag and the Priest were the only couple worth talking or tweeting about this year. (We guess Meghan and Harry, and Kim and Kanye can relax.)
“If I’m honest, it’s only really just starting to dawn on me, the global effect the show has had. People like a bit of transgression, they just do.” Any follower of his career, though, understands that it’s more than just good writing that makes him so very watchable (though good writing, is, politely, what he puts it down to). His chemistry is electric with Ms Phoebe Waller-Bridge, as it was electric with Mr Cumberbatch, and palpable even if you weren’t lucky enough to catch his rendition of Hamlet and – like this interviewer – had to watch a clip on YouTube.
Mr Scott’s character, Tobin, in Modern Love is the most subdued we might ever see him. There’s very little shouting, and none of the wide-eyed glaring that has defined his roles to date. Instead, he plays sweetly, quietly off a tiny baby, and tells goodnight stories to an adorable little girl. Perhaps this is a harbinger of softer roles to come. “I’d love to be in a romcom,” he says. “I love watching people fall in love, and how mad it is.” And yet: it was just announced that he will be playing Tom Ripley in a new adaptation of The Talented Mr Ripley. So much for avoiding the nutters.
“What always amazes me is how innocent we are as human beings,” he says, sidestepping yet another probing question about being so irresistible right now. “We are very easily manipulated by stories. If someone puts scary music behind someone and they’re told this person’s eyes are absolutely terrifying, you go: ‘Oh my God, that person is scary, and his eyes totally freak me out.’”
“But then,” he continues, “[you’re told] ‘the priest is hot, wait till you see him’. And then you look at his eyes in a very different way and it’s the manipulation of the storytelling. It literally changes your character.” Hmmm.
“The success is the writing,” he tries, again, to argue. But it’s hard to be convinced that an actor who’s hopped from one iconic character to another is simply lucky with writing. He sees he’s not getting anywhere and changes tack. “Acting is just a way of experimenting with different parts of myself. Vulnerability is something I’m really, really interested in. I think vulnerability is at the centre of every character I’ve ever played even if they don’t appear or present as vulnerable.”
Throughout this conversation, his eyes have flicked around the bar, and he pauses from time to time to comment on the other patrons. At one point, a woman is coughing so vehemently, he stops mid-sentence to remark, humorously, on whether she might be dying. Now, he spots something on the bar. “Oh my God, she’s reading Brené Brown.” We both turn to stare at the book.
“She writes a lot about vulnerability,” he explains, excited. “[Being vulnerable] is how you get ahead. I really, really strongly believe that. [Vulnerability is] strong, it’s really strong.”
Perhaps this is the secret we’ve been trying to distil about his appeal: Mr Scott uses vulnerability to bring us all into a space of fear or sadness or lust or anger with him so that every character he plays – whether it’s the hottest priest in London, a gay man in Brooklyn trying to become a father, or a murderous villain – thrums with the heartbreak that comes with being human.
“The more I work,” he continues, “the more I just think every story is in some way concerned with love – or the lack of it.” He smiles an earnest little smile and we both know this is the place to stop. “That’s the way life is,” he says. “It’s so fast and furious.”
A couple more backstage BAFTA portraits of Andrew Scott from Charlie Clift, in color this time (from his Instagram, so free of the getty images watermark)
Greg leaned across the table, bright eyes on Mycroft’s thrown back head, on his exposed throat, and he drank in the sound of Mycroft’s delighted laughter.
Mycroft was nearly unrecognizable from his usual proper and buttoned up self. Free of the cares and stresses of his life and his ever-present responsibilities in London, he had been a pleasant–indeed a wonderful–companion. The two men had met most unexpectedly on their separate holidays; after expressing their surprise at choosing to visit the same city at the same time, they had somewhat tentatively agreed to coffee. Which turned into lunch…and then Mycroft invited him to accompany him to a wine tasting.
Now they were slightly warm and loose from excellent wine, from the summer sun, from the heady buzz of their shared company. Perhaps it was the wine, or the freedom of being away from home, or maybe Greg’s joke had really been that funny.
Whatever it was, Mycroft was so relaxed, so open…so approachable in his giddy state, in his loose linen trousers and the actual t-shirt he was wearing, that Greg took a deep breath and did it. He did the thing he’d been dreaming about for years. Breathing deep for courage, crossing his fingers beneath the table for luck, meeting Mycroft’s twinkling grey-blue eyes as he subsided, still chuckling, Greg simply asked, with a face radiating honesty, “Mycroft–would you like to join me for dinner?”
Holding Mycroft’s eyes, Greg let an air of solemnity sink into their convivial mood. “On a date,” he clarified, wanting no misunderstanding about his intentions. He stretched a hand across the table, palm up in invitation. “I’ve had an amazing time today–I don’t want it to end.” Trying to hold back a shiver of anxiety and anticipation, he blurted out, “Not today–and not when our holidays are over.”
“Greg,” Mycroft breathed, sounding as startled as he looked. His hand moved and Greg’s heart leapt, thinking he was about to join their hands. Instead Mycroft’s elegant hand lightly touched the sunglasses tucked at the neckline of his shirt, as if he would don them to hide his eyes. Resisting he looked away, then back across the table, “It’s just–the wine t-talking–”
“No,” Greg denied, voice almost strident. There was no way he could let Mycroft think any of this was down to inebriation or a holiday fling. He softened his voice, eyes hungrily tracking Mycroft’s features in a way he never allowed himself, “I’ve wanted this at home…when I was sober…any argument you can muster, I can tell you you’re wrong. This isn’t a whim.”
Mycroft’s eyes went as bright and liquid as mercury; his lips parted on a soft sigh, and Greg’s heart soared when Mycroft reached out and wound his trembling fingers with Greg’s. “You mean it,” he said, tone wondering. “You…Greg, I’ve thought of you for years but I never dreamed…”
“You didn’t guess? I thought I’d be as transparent as glass.”
“N-no, never.” Mycroft squeezed his hand, a smile of pure happiness breaking out, “Today has been perfect…I would love to go out on a date with you.”
“Brilliant,” Greg said softly, his grin taking over his face. He leaned closer across the tiny table, caressed Mycroft’s cheek with his other hand. “Thank Christ we ran into one another…today was like a miracle and it gave me the courage to ask you.” He ran his thumb over Mycroft’s cheekbone and softly over his temple to delicately touch the lobe of Mycroft’s ear. The action drew a visible shiver and faint blush from the younger man.“ It was fate that we both decided to come here for holiday, and then to run into one another…”
A look of panic flitted over Mycroft’s face, and he very obviously grappled with his conscience for a moment. Greg familiar with the ways of a Holmes, and more than familiar with Mycroft’s omniscience and his surveillance saw it all in a flash. He bit down on a grin when Mycroft looked at him with large guilty eyes and said, “Erm, about that…”
I read it again this morning and I needed to re-reblog this scrumptious flash of mystrade dream ❤️. @savvyblunders, I think I'll never thank you enough ❤️
1. Vague sign of frustration, exasperation, the breath exhale becomes a blow, donating a problem with the concept. He would prefer more time to get together with Martin. 2. Goes into a serious considered answer, looks to the right for facts [maybe timeframe confirmation] Is making an excuse on behalf of Martin. Time apart is not BC’s fault. 3. ‘I leave it to him’ is very telling. It’s putting the ball [blame] in MF’s court. Note the micro expression of looking down, lips closed and tight, shake of the head; accepting of something out of his control. There is a negative [regret] emotion there as he makes the summation. 4. BC likes the question, it causes him to smile and recollect. He umms and laughs; good memories. Very interesting that this is the only time he raises the bottle to his mouth. Note the movement with the bottle! [I will just leave that there shall I?] 5. We start seeing self comforting and tactile subconscious self caresses. He looks away, shifts from one foot to the other, he’s wanting the interview to be over. 6. Now he becomes ‘dreamy’ he enters his own head [couldn’t physically retreat, so mentally does so] Eyes are up indicating imagination/reminiscence and he looses eye contact with interviewer. He adds in a mutual passion, music, and uses the collective ‘our’. However it’s not really in context. The questions is about ‘a fun night out together’ and BC gives a answer that is a statement of a shared joy. The answer should have been; ‘we go out to music events’ or ‘we take time to listen to music together’. The answer indicates that the sharing of music is more than an ‘event’ it’s intimate, something between the two of them alone. They do this thing with music and it’s just the two of them. He tries to hide a self-smile behind his hand. 7. Strokes lips as he recalls memories. Comes back to the work excuse as reason for separation, [BC had just finished TFE and been abroad] 8. Focus is back on interview. He wants it to wrap up and so uses a conclusion of ‘anyway’. He then takes advantage of a noise to divert the interviewer.
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