Andrew Scott’s Best Performance Yet Is in Elsinore

We’re finding the movies at a very Hamlet time in their existence. Last year, Chloé Zhao linked the play’s origins to the loss of a child in her adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet, Mamoru Hosoda conjured up a gender-flipped purgatorial anime riff of it in Scarlet, and Riz Ahmed starred in a take from Aneil Karia set in present-day London. On the nonfiction front, Elvira Lind documented her husband Oscar Isaac’s preparation to play the character at the Public Theater in King Hamlet, while Pinny Grylls documented her husband Sam Crane’s efforts, with fellow actor Mark Oosterveen, to put together an in-game production of the play during COVID lockdown in Grand Theft Hamlet. And this year is bringing us Elsinore, which just screened at TIFF and will release in theaters next January, from theater and film director Simon Stone — a biopic about the Scottish actor Ian Charleson that’s deeply enmeshed with Shakespeare’s most monumental work. The movie, which stars a phenomenal Andrew Scott, focuses on the last year of Charleson’s life when, in 1989, at the age of 40, he’d get a chance to step into the role of Hamlet at the National Theatre in London just a few months before his death due to AIDS.

If this all sounds excruciatingly sad, it’s actually often darkly droll, thanks to a script from Stephen Beresford that leans into its protagonist’s habit of responding to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune with a deadpan quip. Charleson’s professional life was shaped by a kind of slow-motion joke. His role as sprinter Eric Liddel in Chariots of Fire, which would win Best Picture and endless acclaim, vaulted him into global fame, but not the Hollywood success he wanted (and remained in the closet for). In the film, which has been given the crisp blue-tinged light of a cold morning, Ian is followed around by Vangelis’s theme song like the monster from It Follows, to the point where he describes it as all people remember from the movie. He’s auditioning for roles that have him putting on an American accent to bark things about securing the perimeter, and watching friends and former lovers sicken and die from this virus for which there’s no cure. “Time’s running out,” he confesses to his best friend, Patsy (an ostentatious Billie Piper), and when she asks him for what, he replies “… for something to happen.”

And then it does, in the form of the current star of Hamlet freezing during the ghost scene, then walking off stage and refusing to return. The movie plays this scene for comedy, punctuating it with a shot of the name on the dressing-room door the fleeing actor slams behind him: Daniel Day-Lewis (who’d never do theater again). The call that Ian gets from director Richard Eyre (Johnny Flynn) for the role of a lifetime comes right around the time he discovers his first lesion, a sign that that lifetime is soon to be cut short. His doctor, Margaret Johnson (Olivia Colman, getting a lot out of a part that mostly involves looking put out), is aghast at her patient’s intention to throw himself into a job that’s so famously demanding (as she puts it, no one ever walked out of Hamlet saying “what a short evening of light entertainment”). But Ian is intent on going through with the play, and Scott, when he talks about the role with a wry little smile on his face, manages to make the character look lit from within, such a true believer in his art that he’d gladly trade some of the months and weeks he has left for time on the stage. “I’d rather die of Hamlet than of AIDS,” he tells a friend.

There’s no play more suited for meditating on mortality than Hamlet, and for the most part Elsinore does a delicate job of braiding together scenes of Ian undergoing treatment at Margaret’s clinic with ones of him rehearsing with a group of co-stars who, at his own request, have not been told about his illness. It’s not that Ian thinks they’ll care, but that he doesn’t want his work to be judged through the lens of his dying. Ian was not out, and wasn’t ready to go public about having AIDS either, something he fights about with filmmaker Derek Jarman (David Dawson), who likes to bring up that he gave Ian his first role, in a film that the actor then scrubs from his résumé alongside any traces of his sexuality. Derek was outspoken about being gay and having HIV, and thought of doing so as his responsibility in what he considered a war against his community, but Elsinore neither damns nor absolves Ian for his refusal to follow suit, instead allowing the character to twist in his own doubts and regrets.

In the film’s feverish finale, orchestral music soars over a montage of physical agony and passionate performing, a prolonged battering of grand emotion. It is, curiously, the worst part of a good drama that otherwise trusts its lead to transmit the wonder and the horror of his situation himself. For my part, the most wrenching scene in the movie is one in which Ian sits up in bed at the clinic after having been hospitalized, preparing to tell his parents, played by Peter Mullan and Georgie Glen, that he is gay and dying of AIDS. Scott’s face, in this shot, is a whole novel, disintegrating into tears before being shored up again, eventually rearranged into something resembling a welcoming smile that teeters on the edge of collapse. Ian is terrified of the conversation that’s about to happen, of having to admit to lying, of telling his mother and father that they’re due to outlive him. But he’s also an actor, and he works to put together the expression he wants to greet his parents with like he’s creating a masterpiece out of shattered glass. 

Sign up for The Critics

A weekly dispatch on the cultural discourse, for subscribers only.

Become a Subscriber

Already a subscriber? Sign in

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
Vox Media, LLC Terms and Privacy Notice

By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice and to receive email correspondence from us.