Andrew Scott opened the London Film Festival in Elsinore, and Olivia Coleman hangs over the conversation because the film puts him at the center of Ian Charleson’s final chapter. He plays a dying Charleson, the actor who took Hamlet in 1989, and the early awards chatter has already pushed Scott into Oscar talk.
Toronto and 2017
Critics who saw the film in Toronto hailed Scott’s performance as Ian Charleson as career-best work. That reaction is carrying the project beyond a festival launch and into awards-season discussion, especially because Scott had already played Hamlet in 2017 to award-winning acclaim.
National Theatre Hamlet
Elsinore was written by Stephen Beresford and directed by Simon Stone, and the film has been researched in detail. It sits inside the history of the National Theatre Hamlet production, where Daniel Day-Lewis was cast by Richard Eyre, Judi Dench played Gertrude and Stella Gonet played Ophelia.
Stella Gonet remembered the night the production shifted: “I went straight to Dan’s dressing room to see how he was – he was in shock, he couldn’t speak.” She added, “The dresser came running in saying, ‘Can I take your boots?’” and “He had to take the costume to give it to Jeremy Northam [understudying Hamlet].”
September 5 aftermath
Daniel Day-Lewis broke down at the 65th performance on September 5 and left the stage after the ghost’s exit in Act I, saying that he could not continue. He later clarified, “It was communication with my own dead father [the poet Cecil Day-Lewis]. But I don’t remember seeing any ghosts of my father.”
Richard Eyre said, “I had wrong-footed myself,” while Stella Gonet added, “All the understudies were going, ‘Oh my god!’ because they hadn’t looked at their parts for six months.” That is the film’s strongest pull: it does not just revisit a celebrated performance, it reopens a fragile period around Aids, memory and the people who were inside the room when the production changed shape.
Andrew Scott and Oscar
Andrew Scott is the reason Elsinore has moved so quickly from festival opener to awards contender, and the Toronto response makes the Oscar talk feel like a serious forecast rather than a flattering review quote. The practical question now is simple: whether that momentum holds as the film travels from London into the rest of the season.
