Sherlock's devilishly alluring Moriarty. The hot priest of Fleabag. And now, an Oscar-tipped role in Andrew Haigh's ghostly gay romance, All of Us Strangers, opposite Paul Mescal. Andrew Scott has been a staple of our screens for over a decade now, such is our familiarity with his heavy, emotive eyes. He's an understated actor, never one to lure us in with showiness — even his aforementioned Moriarty was more restrained than you might remember — and someone you can always trust to elevate the work.
That goes for those familiar tentpole roles, sure, but he's come in clutch as a standout supporter plenty of times. He's in Sam Mendes' one-take WWI drama 1917 for all of two minutes but haunts the frame for every second, lingering long after the camera has moved on. His brusque, comic turn in Catherine Called Birdy is sensitive, playful and delightfully mean. Then there's his uplifting presence in lesser-seen queer movies of the last decade, like Handsome Devil and Pride. But which are the best parts? These are our seven favourite Andrew Scott roles.
7. 1917
2019, directed by Sam Mendes
Scott appears briefly in Sam Mendes' World War I movie 1917, a couple of minutes or so at most, but he hits like a bazooka. As a trench lieutenant charged with sending the English boys over the top — invariably to be blown up by mortar fire, or shredded by a German machine gun — he eerily embodies the broken morality, and haunted spirit, of a generation of men rendered hollow by untold horror. “Cheerio,” he chirps, as more boys go to die, like they've just popped out for milk. Scott's sliver of screen time tees up the presiding, ghastly tone. Death is everywhere, and everyone is expendable.
6. Catherine Called Birdy
2022, directed by Lena Dunham
In Catherine Called Birdy, Scott portrays a weary Medieval lord who, beyond anything else, wants to send his daughter, Catherine (called Birdy, played by Bella Ramsey), off to be married. It doesn't matter to who: young, old, ugly, handsome and debonair, as long as he's got a nice dowager to offer. Understandably, she's not having any of it. As if plucked from a defiantly messy bedroom in the present — or indeed if she was the fifth titular girl from Dunham's Girls — Birdy is volatile, rambunctious and iron-willed, determined to get nothing but her own way, if only for the sake of it. It's a fun, pop-punky injection of post-modern feminism into the Ye Olde Days. And everyone seems to be having the best of times.
5. Handsome Devil
2016, directed by John Butler
Long before Nicholas Galitzine was locking lips with the prominently-eyebrowed son of the fictional American president, he jostled with the lads of an Irish rugby school under the tutelage of a tired-eyed Scott (are we noticing a theme?) In Handsome Devil, Scott portrays closeted English teacher Mr. Sherry, who also endures the simmering, performative homophobia of the macho kids at Wood Hill College. For all intents and purposes, he's playing the gay teacher that every gay kid at an all-boys school wishes they had; maybe the one he wishes he had. Scott has said that he doesn't “want to trade” in his own sexuality — he has been publicly gay since at least 2013, though he isn't a fan of the “open” label — and no actor's career should be stymied by their identity. But experience begets authenticity, and all that.
4. Pride
2014, directed by Matthew Warchus
Scott deploys a convincing Welsh accent as a mining town's favourite gay son in Pride, which recounts the unlikely real-life coalition of queer activists and striking miners — called Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners, believe it or not — in Thatcher's Britain. It's a heartening story of triumph through unity, about commonality, and what we can collectively achieve if we park our individual prejudices; not just the parochial homophobia of the Welsh hamlet that the London lesbians and gays descend upon, but the current of classism within the queer group's own ranks. It's poignant for this, compounded by the story being set amid the early embers of Britain's AIDS crisis. Scott's performance is quietly measured, appropriate of an ensemble piece that's more about the sum of the whole than celebrating individual significance. But he's a vital cog in a moving machine.
3. Fleabag
2019, written by Phoebe Waller-Bridge
Scott was upgraded to bona fide sex symbol with his part as every-boyfriend's-favourite-2019-Halloween-costume-slash-pastorly-pin-up, the “sexy priest” of Phoebe Waller-Bridge's blackly comic, widely beloved series Fleabag. He's something of a mess, with tousled hair and Scotchy breath that you can smell through the screen: this isn't your usual holier-than-thou holy man so much as a guy whose own relationship to God is as conflictual as any of us God-fearing normies. So everyone on Twitter wanted to shag him for a while — maybe it was the collar, maybe it was the way he monologued about love's awfulness — which shouldn't distract from how great a performance this was, no doubt aided by some furiously funny work on the page by writer-co-star Waller-Bridge. That parting line, “it'll pass,” still haunts the most lovelorn amongst us in our dreams. Thanks for that, Andrew.
2. Sherlock
2010, written by Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat
Of course we'd be remiss not to acknowledge that, for a certain contingent of super-online Tumblrite girls (and gays) in the early-to-mid 2010s, Scott was already a heartthrob well in advance of the hot priest apropos of his impishly alluring Moriarty in modern-day Sherlock. Here was the show that put the previously unknown Scott on the map, and a groundbreaking success for the BBC at the turn of the prestige era. Even as a little-known debutant, he just seemed perfect for it: deliciously unhinged, with dark eyes full of menace, prancing around like a prankish court jester, as you might well expect of a maniacal sociopath. That and he played the historically queer-coded Moriarty as so gay for Sherlock (a pre-Avengers Benedict Cumberbatch). Few actors have prompted so many young gay awakenings.
1. All of Us Strangers
2023, directed by Andrew Haigh
In Scott, English indie darling filmmaker Andrew Haigh clearly found his muse. Haigh's films are known for their stillness and restraint; Scott often works best in a quieter register, expressing with minute movements, or a lack of movement, or just with a twitch, a dart, of those heavy eyes. It's a marriage made in heaven, and so All of Us Strangers offers some of the greatest work Scott has done on screen. You're better off knowing little: the basics are that it's an urban, gay love story centring on Scott's lonely writer and Paul Mescal's lost depressive, except it isn't really that. It's a ghost story, about one man reaching through the darkness of the decades to find closure after a traumatic event in his past — if that's your interpretation. Whatever the case, by the end, Scott will have cut you in half.