In the fourth scene of the fourth act of our melancholy hero stands on a desolate Danish plain watching a Norwegian army march into Poland on a trivial errand. Turning to the audience, in the last of his soliloquies, he imagines “the imminent death of twenty thousand men that for a fantasy and trick of fame go to their graves like beds.”
How must it have felt for Ian Charleson, the sandy-haired Scottish actor who rose to international stardom in Chariots of Fire but was dying of Aids by the time he played his own legendary Hamlet at London’s National Theatre in 1989, to utter those lines? A silent, unjust war raged around him, as young men all over London were dying in isolation, their sheets burned as soon as their bodies were carted out, or, if they were lucky, driven home to take their final breaths in their childhood beds, eliciting whispers from the neighbours.
There is no way to know whether Hamlet, a role steeped in questions about life and death, was ever before played by a man who understood that his own death was so close. Those extraordinary circumstances are what animate the new film directed by Simon Stone that revisits and rejoices in Charleson’s final months. Many great actors have described their art as a means of escape – from the humdrum of reality, from the cage of the self. Andrew Scott, the Irish actor who is playing Charleson in to a degree of fanfare approaching Oscar preordainment, does not share this view. Nor, he suspects, did Ian Charleson.
“The more I act,” Scott tells me from the quietest recess of a West Hollywood hotel restaurant on a hot October day, “the more I see it not as pretending to be someone else but as exploring different parts of myself. Who would I be if I was born in this era or in this body or in this set of circumstances? A great actor once said that acting is an escape from acting. I think there’s a lot of sense in that.”
If I’ve understood Scott correctly, whereas living can at times be a kind of pantomime, the stage – or the screen – offers the promise of truth. Hamlet tells his own troupe of players that acting ought to hold the mirror up to nature. It’s hard not to think of that famous line early in , when Charleson, in the privacy of his Hampstead flat, scans the contours of his body with a blue plastic hand mirror, desperately hoping for another day free from the blue-brown lesions of Kaposi’s sarcoma that for many in the early days of HIV announced the progression to full-blown Aids.
Scott, who turned 50 last month, grew up in Dublin in the shadow of the Aids crisis and, like so many gay men of his age, has often thought how lucky he is to have been born just a few years later than the generation that died en masse. With better education and better treatment, men of his era survived, but for them sex and death could never be wholly disentangled.
“The fact that the current generation of young gay people feels a freedom from that is wonderful,” Scott says. He began his professional stage career at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, in 1996, and he remembers what he calls “a conspiracy of silence around sexuality” at the time, a carryover from the beginning of the crisis when governments refused to speak or act. revives not only the National Theatre of the 1980s but also the gay bars and cruising grounds of Hampstead Heath, where the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, a group of activists who dressed as Catholic nuns, educated gay men on safe practices at a time of governmental neglect. “People would ask them, ‘What do we do? How do we protect ourselves?’” says Scott, who learned more about Charleson and his era from his friend Stephen Beresford’s rigorously researched script. “Because there was no information, no help, all this silence. The terror of that silence is the thing that offends. That should be where the shame lies.”
Though Scott found mainstream success on British TV shows such as and Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s as the so-called Hot Priest – he has remained dedicated to the theatre and just completed a two-week run of Simon Stephens’s 50-minute monologue in New York. (In fact the play’s 19 performances were filmed as part of an upcoming motion picture about the process of creating theatre.) In recent years Scott has taken on a pair of haunted gay roles, in Netflix’s stylish retelling of the story and, opposite Paul Mescal, in 2023’s All of Us Strangers. And yet he is still the rare openly gay actor whose sexuality has been greeted with a collective shrug.
“Well, it very interesting,” he says, shaking his head. “What was so insidious was that Ian and his predecessors had something to contribute to the film and television industry but weren’t given the opportunities in the same way, or else they were given the opportunities but they were also given a sort of silent choice: You can have that, but you have to conceal a huge part of your identity in return, while their straight counterparts didn’t have to make that sacrifice. In fact that part of their identity was celebrated rather than concealed or derided. I do feel that the playing field is starting to level out. There’s that great expression that prejudice doesn’t survive proximity. If you see people, you become less frightened of them.”
“He has no shield,” says costar Olivia Colman of Scott. “An instant and direct route to any emotion. He is the most beautiful empath.” Dior jacket and collar.
In the film Charleson bemoans the fact that all anyone remembers of Chariots of Fire, which won best picture at 1982’s Academy Awards, is the theme music. For those who came up in London’s theatre scene when he did, the telling of his story feels overdue. Charleson was, by all accounts, a beloved figure in his artistic circle: clever and churlish, an excellent dancer and singer, abundantly generous to young actors. Hilton McRae, a Scottish actor who first met Charleson as a fellow student at the University of Edinburgh and was a close friend throughout his life, has seen three times. “Andrew Ian Charleson,” he says. “There’s that same sense of mischief. That same wicked wit. And I think off-screen he’s got the same kind of Celtic integrity about how to run his life.”
McRae missed his old friend’s Hamlet because he was busy playing Macbeth in his hometown of Dundee. So for him the film has been an almost uncanny invitation to enter into Charleson’s mind at a crucial moment. “When he had to say the lines ‘we defy augury. There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all.’ How do you these things knowing what’s coming? How much was he hoping, how much was he in a kind of denial? I saw him when he’d finished. I went round to look after him one day, and he had and by his bedside. He was looking at Benedick, and he was looking at Lear. He wanted to do them. The marvellous thing about this film is that it’s basically about how important art is.”
For Juliet Stevenson, who plays Gertrude, Hamlet’s mother, in making the film offered an almost mystic mix of art and memory. Stevenson starred in at the National Theatre at the very moment when Charleson played his Hamlet; the two plays were in repertory on the National’s main stage, the Olivier. Years later, in 2017, she played Gertrude when Andrew Scott took on the role of Hamlet in an acclaimed run in London’s West End. She first met Ian Charleson when she was 20 and newly out of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. An actor had broken her leg in a production of at the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon, and Stevenson joined the cast while they were in dress rehearsals. Charleson was Ariel, and she remembers seeing him suspended over the stage by wires singing “Full fathom five.”
“He was very beautiful, very camp, very kind of golden,” she recalls. “It’s easy to sentimentalise people who die young, who have a story like Ian’s, but he really was adored. He was supremely witty, funny, naughty, and acerbic, but kind, generous. Men or women – we were all a little bit in love with him.” Stevenson will never forget the moment she greeted Charleson at the National in 1989, not having seen him since Stratford. “Backstage the National is a great big community. Every show shares the green room, the canteen, the corridors. I was in a crowded elevator, waiting before the doors shut, and I looked across this landing and saw Ian walking towards the bar. I said, ‘Hey, Ian! Hi!’ He turned and said, ‘Hi, Juliet!’ I said, ‘Welcome to the National. How are you doing?’ He said, ‘Well, they say I’m dying! Isn’t that crazy?’ I just kind of stared at him. And then the elevator doors shut. The young man who’d been trying to keep it secret saw me and launched that message across that landing with a kind of strange gaiety. But – he was playing Hamlet! He turned his suffering into art. I hope that doesn’t sound pretentious, but I do believe that’s what he did.”
The director Richard Eyre’s much-ballyhooed staging of arrived at the National with Daniel Day-Lewis in the title role; the actor was making a sort of homecoming to the stage as a newly minted movie star. (He would go on to win an Oscar for his performance in the next year.) Day-Lewis’s Hamlet was perhaps doomed by unreasonably high expectations; he did not receive the expected raves, and in September 1989, in the middle of a scene in which the prince confronts his father’s ghost, he walked off the stage and out of the production. Day-Lewis has not performed onstage since that night.
If there’s something Eyre disputes in where he is played by the actor Johnny Flynn, it is the suggestion that he offered Charleson the opportunity to take over Hamlet with a kind of benevolent calm. Charleson had been a huge success as Sky Masterson in Eyre’s production of Guys and Dolls at the National in 1982, and Eyre regarded him as a hugely capable classical actor too. But casting him this time was fraught with danger. “It was unimaginably painful,” Eyre remembers. “Daniel was a very close friend, and it was a terrible shock when he dropped out. I made the decision to cast Ian with the knowledge that he was ill and in defiance of a lot of my colleagues, who thought I was making a big mistake. My character appears absolutely stoical and generous, but in reality I was a total mess.”
Andrew Scott wears a doublet from the National’s 1989 Hamlet, which starred Daniel Day-Lewis and later
Ian Charleson. Doublet, National Theatre costume & props hire. Wool trousers, Studio Nicholson. Vest
and belt, stylist’s own.
The film acknowledges Charleson’s reluctance to come out publicly and even, at first, to his castmates. Ian McKellen had come out a year earlier, on a live BBC broadcast, in part to protest Section 28, a Thatcher-era law that banned schools from “intentionally promoting homosexuality.” Charleson, always out to his friends, felt that the circumstances of his career made public disclosure impossible. “McKellen went on to become this astonishing global movie star, but at the time he didn’t have a movie career to worry about,” Eyre explains. “Ian Charleson had starred in and had a significant presence in Gandhi. He was lined up to be the next Robert Redford. I think he would have matured into a real international film star. But interestingly, he wanted more to do theatre. He thought being a movie star was slightly ridiculous, as of course it is.”
At a moment when swingeing US foreign aid cuts have undermined the global fight against HIV, Elsinore has a sense of political urgency that its creators may not have envisioned for it. While Scott knows that the film does not depart wholly from the sombre tenor of his recent screen roles, he plays Charleson for laughs because humour was his essential mode and Scott regards Charleson’s unlikely Hamlet – with its four-thousand lines over four hours – as a herculean effort against all odds.
“In some ways my fear was that we would fetishise Ian’s death rather than celebrate his life,” Scott says. “And actually his decision to play Hamlet at the very end of his life, to nail his colours to the mast in that way, when time was running out, is so life-loving.” Margaret Johnson, the doctor who cared for Charleson in his final months and who spoke extensively with Stephen Beresford as he was researching the screenplay, remembered occasions when he would come to her office the morning after a performance looking especially beleaguered. “Not tonight,” she would tell him. He would acquiesce, but then Johnson would watch him out her office window hailing a cab to the National. “As he says, I’d rather die of than of Aids,” Scott adds, quoting his character. “That’s somebody who wants to live. That’s important for me to say.”
Olivia Colman, who plays Johnson in was drawn to the tension between her character’s responsibility for the preservation of life and Charleson’s wish to focus on joy, even if it cost him time. “Art and joy make life worth living. He really proved that,” she says. Colman, like Eyre, thinks Charleson would be proud of Scott’s portrayal. “Oh, Andrew! He has no shield. An instant and direct route to any emotion. He is the most beautiful empath, and because it’s real, he’s not acting. He’s being.”
Scott and his two siblings lost their mother in 2024, and he says that work has had a grounding effect in the aftermath. Hollywood actors often speak of the necessity to strike while the iron is hot, and if he has the glorious awards season that has been augured for him (Scott would be the first openly gay man to win an acting Oscar), he will have his pick of roles in 2027. But instead he would like to do less. “I think it’s time to get my work-life balance back a bit, to sort of smell the roses,” he says. He wouldn’t mind a romantic comedy, or even a musical. If Charleson had at his bedside, perhaps it was because he knew that dying young would prevent him from doing the thing great Shakespearean actors, such as John Gielgud and Laurence Olivier, do: play Hamlet in their relative youth and play Lear as they age. But for Scott, such ambitions are far from the mind.
“Lear?” He laughs. “Give me a minute!”
Main image: Brushed cotton jacket and sweater, Celine. Hair: Moe Mukai; Grooming: Victoria Bond; Tailor: Mirpuri Bespoke; Production: Rosco Production; Set Design: Jack Appleyard.