There are very few actors who can say they helped boost the search traffic for religious porn by 162 per cent, but then very few actors inspire the kind of rabid, erotic intrigue that Andrew Scott cultivates in his fans.
Scott, who seems to explode back into the public consciousness every other year, has earned another round of plaudits and sexual fantasies. This time it was in Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s hotly discussed, much-adored, Twitter-trending BBC comedy Fleabag, in which he stars in the second series as her family priest and, ultimately, as her main love interest.
When he last careened into the public eye as Moriarty in Sherlock, he spoke about how young girls were handing him CDs of custom-made videos charting his fictional romances with Benedict Cumberbatch. In Fleabag, he’s achieved something similar: he’s become universally known as “The Hot Priest”, where masses of viewers admit their desire to do terrible things in confessionals. Even Jessica Chastain took to Twitter to say, “Omg the hot priest in #Fleabag is ruining me.”
And so, for the standout turn of the year in the standout show of the year, who else but Scott to win Hugo Boss Standout Performance?
When we both sat down to watch the “kneel” scene (“Or the ‘confessional’ scene, as it should be called,” Scott added), he said it was the first time he had ever watched it. This might be because he can be -pedantic about what he hopes ends up on screen. “Sometimes I feel like I’d like to be in the editing suite, frankly,” he said, “because I’ve been disappointed to a certain degree.” Yet, although Scott says all the key relationships in his career have been with writers, it’s Fleabag’s editor, Gary Dollner, whom he calls a “genius”, with the kind of reverence other actors reserve for their directors ...
“It’s lovely to watch this now, after all these months,” he says, smiling as we watch The Priest deliver a monologue about his love of fancy cassocks. “I think [Phoebe’s] great achievement is these speeches. She’s able to contain all these varying tones in the show, which I think is why people respond to it. It can be heartbreaking, surreal, then there are these grand gestures like pictures falling off walls and foxes following you round.”
Later, when we talk more about these same symbols, I use the word “operatic”. “Exactly,” he says. There’s something about Fleabag that he loves because of how theatrical it is and the way his character gets to interrupt the show’s speedy witticisms with Pinteresque pauses. “This scene is full of erotically charged silences,” he says as we watch the moments before the “kneel” scene… sorry, “confessional” scene. “It’s amazing how much it sort of turned people on.”
For a man who has made everyone google “How to have sex with a priest” (and helped increase the sale of M&S tinnies almost as much as Diane Abbott) Scott is quiet and particular in person, preferring the micro to the macro. Sat in a stairwell of the Old Vic theatre (he couldn’t stand the vacuum in the auditorium) I asked him if it had been difficult to be an openly gay actor who has managed to play both queer and straight roles. “You’re never described as openly gay at a party,” he says coolly. “‘This is my openly gay friend Darren.’ ‘She’s openly Irish.’ It implies a defiance I don’t feel.”
It’s clear that Scott has been burned before by journalists who have made his sexuality into a political statement when he doesn’t see it as such. “Sexuality isn’t something you can cultivate, particularly. It isn’t a talent.” Instead, he says, he’s taken work – including Fleabag – to set an example for how a gay actor can still nail the chemistry when acting a straight relationship. “You believe the relationship,” he concludes. “That’s my job.”
Where he does light up, however, is when talking about his craft. He loves to collaborate and work with familiar faces as much as possible, particularly because they can develop a shorthand together. Alongside director Sam Mendes and playwright Simon Stephens, this now includes Waller-Bridge: they acted alongside each other in Roaring Trade at Soho Theatre in 2009, where Waller-Bridge’s Jess asked Scott’s Donny to stick his dick in her Filofax (not an innuendo).
For an actor who keeps going from strength to strength on the screen, Scott keeps coming back to the theatre more than most. “I didn’t think I’d do a play this year,” he says, but a new, sexually fluid version of Noël Coward’s Present Laughter lured him back. Maybe it’s because he was “involved in all aspects” or maybe it’s because The Old Vic has such an important place in Scott’s career: it was the first theatre in which he performed in London after the move from Dublin in 1999; he did Coward’s Design For Living here in 2010; then he brought Stephens’ cult classic Sea Wall – perhaps theatre’s most successful monologue show before Fleabag – here in 2018.
The great joy of the theatre for Scott, though, is the fact that on stage he is in charge of his own destiny, with no one else to leave his best work on the cutting room floor. “You direct yourself,” he says, then he doubles back: “Of course there’s a director, but in the auditorium, if you feel the audience is getting a little coughy… you’ve got to think, ‘Well, it’s my job to get them back.’”
That opportunity to bargain with and seduce an audience is what makes Scott so astonishing when he acts: that sense you’re watching something occur, naturally, for the first time and you’re lucky enough to catch it. “There’s no quality of silence more acute than when someone forgets their lines on stage,” says Scott, luminescent. Trying to re-create this – while knowing every line forensically – is one of his favourite techniques. “To get that quality of ‘Oh, my God. This really is happening’, to trick the audience, it’s playful in a real, proper sense.”
This sense of play, and experimentation, is also vital to why Scott chooses to take such a varied pool of roles. Getting in ruts, he says, is “why typecasting can happen. It creates such a strong string that you can’t see anything else.” He had been craving to do a romantic comedy, craving to show “how [they don’t] have to be trite and silly”, and then Fleabag came along: a chance for the man who had become so known for antagonists to be known as something different. “If you’re then told that that person is attractive, through the female gaze… then people think, ‘Oh, maybe he was always delightful or scary or benign.’ My job is to smash to pieces whatever came before.”
Turns out, it may have worked too well: “Somebody said to me recently, ‘Would you ever want to play a villain?’ I was like, ‘Oh, my God.’”
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