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.
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.
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. It’s also a role the Academy has never resisted. Voters are reliably moved by the actor staring down the barrel of death — Tom Hanks in “Philadelphia” (1993), Matthew McConaughey in “Dallas Buyers Club” (2013) and Anthony Hopkins vanishing into dementia in “The Father” (2020).
Charleson was a real man and a real actor, dying as he did, playing Hamlet as he did. That is not a fact that asks for votes so much as one that issues a commandment, and I dare any Academy member not to see the worth in honoring such a life through a vessel as gifted as Scott. Then there is Olivia Colman, who has entered her “Maggie Smith” era and is plainly having the time of her life.
Her supporting turn as Charleson’s doctor is all steel and mischief — grumpy one moment, gutting the next — the work of a past winner (“The Favourite”) who keeps finding registers no one knew she had. It belongs in the supporting actress conversation without an asterisk, the season’s most quotable grande dame showcase since Smith herself. Watch, too, for Billie Piper, as a casting director and Charleson’s confidant, who does the quietest and maybe the most surprising work in the film.
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