Could Andrew Scott make history? That question has been hanging over Telluride and Toronto ever since audiences got their first look at his towering performance in ELSINORE, Simon Stone’s new drama, which premiered at Telluride before crossing over to the Toronto International Film Festival. Scott plays Ian Charleson, a Scottish actor whose momentum has stalled in the years since CHARIOTS OF FIRE made him a name. The setting is 1989, and when Daniel Day-Lewis abruptly exits a production of HAMLET at London’s National Theatre, Charleson spots his chance to prove, once and for all, what he can do on a stage — even as AIDS is quietly destroying his body, and even as his doctor, played by Olivia Colman, warns him that pushing through the role could hasten his decline.

Critics have been quick to point out how neatly the casting folds in on itself. Scott has his own history playing Hamlet in London to great acclaim, which makes watching him inhabit a man whose Hamlet becomes a final act of defiance feel less like performance and more like reckoning. At its core, ELSINORE plays like a tribute to actors themselves — to acting as a calling rather than a job, and to the nerve it takes to keep stepping into the light while your body is failing you. Buried inside that tribute is a real piece of history waiting to happen: no openly gay man has ever won the Academy Award for Best Actor, and Scott’s work here has people wondering if he could be the one to finally break that streak.

The momentum around the film was on full display Saturday, September 13, when Scott walked onto the stage of the Royal Alexandra Theatre to a wave of applause for TIFF’s “In Conversation” series. Moderated by Keith Bennie, TIFF’s vice president of public programming, the conversation gave audiences a rare, extended look at both the making of ELSINORE and the arc of a career that has been building toward a moment like this one.

In ELSINORE, Andrew Scott takes on the role of Ian Charleson, capturing the actor as he prepared to play Hamlet while quietly living with AIDS. Charleson was also a gay actor navigating a profession where being open about his sexuality could have derailed his career — a reality Scott, who came out publicly in a 2013 interview with The Independent, feels deeply connected to. For him, the role carries a weight that goes far beyond craft. He has spent his life in the theater, and stepping into a part that Charleson and his peers would never have been offered as working actors of their era is, in his words, still profoundly moving.

At the same time, Scott was determined not to let the film collapse Charleson’s story into his illness. He wanted audiences to see a man who was trying to live, not one being mourned in advance — someone full of vitality and humor who happened to accomplish something extraordinary, rather than a figure defined by his death. That instinct shaped how Scott approached the physical and emotional demands of playing Hamlet this time around too. He was adamant that the film reject any polite, tidy image of theater as a genteel pursuit capped off with a cocktail afterward. Instead, he wanted to convey just how punishing and Olympian the work really is — a truth that often goes unseen by audiences.

Underscoring all of this was Scott’s own grief, having lost his mother a year or two before making the film. That loss became part of the emotional undercurrent running through the performance. ELSINORE opens in theaters on November 20.