The first official trailer for ELSINORE has arrived, and it’s a striking introduction to a film that has already been winning hearts on the festival circuit. Andrew Scott leads as the late actor Ian Charleson, and the footage suggests a performance of rare intensity and vulnerability.

Directed by Simon Stone, whose previous work includes THE DIG, and written by Stephen Beresford of PRIDE, the film is inspired by Charleson’s remarkable life and, in particular, the extraordinary pressure he faced while preparing to play Hamlet at the National Theatre in London. The official synopsis calls it a powerful, deeply moving and inspiring true story about an actor confronting incredible odds in pursuit of the performance of his life.

Early reaction from the fall festivals suggests the film delivers on that promise. Deadline’s Pete Hammond called Scott’s work “heartbreakingly great” and a “performance for the ages,” high praise that places him firmly in the awards conversation. Olivia Colman stars alongside him, and Scott also serves as a producer on the project, which speaks to just how personal this one is for him.

ELSINORE screens next at the London Film Festival, before StudioCanal brings it to Irish/UK cinemas on January 29, 2027. American audiences won’t have to wait nearly as long, as Focus holds the U.S. rights and will open the film on November 20. If the trailer and the early buzz are anything to go by, this is one to mark in the calendar.

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.

STARLINGS, the striking debut novel from actor-turned-author Russell Tovey (THE NIGHT MANAGER, ANGELS IN AMERICA), has arrived as an Audible original, and its two lead performers are opening up about what it took to bring the story to life. Andrew Scott (FLEABAG, SHERLOCK) and George MacKay (1917, SENSE AND SENSIBILITY) sat down for an Audible Roundtable alongside Tovey himself to talk through the emotional terrain of the project, and the conversation is as layered as the story it explores.

At its centre is Donald, a forty-something aspiring drag queen carrying a lifetime of bitterness beneath the nail polish, estranged from his northern hometown ever since his father threw him out for wearing his late mother’s clothes. That fragile equilibrium is shattered when his younger brother Owen, strange and beautiful and utterly unexpected, turns up on his doorstep, forcing Donald to confront whether Owen’s arrival might pull him out of his depression, or whether he’s fated to drag his sibling down with him instead.

Scott takes on Donald while MacKay plays Owen, and both actors are no strangers to emotionally charged, complex storytelling, though STARLINGS presented a different kind of challenge given its audio-only format. Across the roundtable, the trio dig into Tovey’s inspiration for the novel, the tricky business of embodying a character purely through voice rather than physical presence, and the significance of drag culture as a lens for Donald’s journey. It’s a rare glimpse into the space where page and performance meet, and a chance to hear directly from the people who shaped it.

Anyone keen to experience STARLINGS for themselves can find it on Audible now.

Andrew Scott is heading back to TIFF, and this time he’s bringing one of the most anticipated dramas of the year with him. ELSINORE, directed by Simon Stone, has been selected for the Special Presentations programme at the 51st Toronto International Film Festival, where it will receive its Canadian premiere. The film is among the first 64 titles unveiled across the Gala and Special Presentations sections for the festival, which runs September 10 to 20.

Scott stars as the late Ian Charleson, the acclaimed stage and screen actor, in a biographical drama written by Stephen Beresford. ELSINORE follows the final months of Charleson’s life as he delivers what became a legendary performance as Hamlet at London’s National Theatre, all while privately living with AIDS. It’s a role that demands both technical command and deep emotional exposure, and given Scott’s range, this feels like exactly the kind of part he was built for. Academy Award winner Olivia Colman co-stars, adding further weight to an already extraordinary cast.

The ensemble surrounding Scott and Colman is stacked with talent: Billie Piper, Johnny Flynn, Luke Thompson, Monica Dolan, Juliet Stevenson, Joe Locke, Adeel Akhtar, Matthew Beard, David Dawson, Kadiff Kirwan, Dickie Beau and Peter Mullan all feature. Scott is also producing the film, a sign of how personally invested he is in bringing Charleson’s story to the screen with care and accuracy.

The industry has already taken notice. Earlier this month, Focus Features acquired ELSINORE for distribution across the U.S. and several international territories, following what was described as a competitive bidding process. That kind of demand ahead of a festival premiere speaks volumes about the buzz building around this project.

Buzz has been building fast around ELSINORE, the Simon Stone-directed drama that’s quickly become one of the most talked-about titles heading into fall awards season. Word first broke last week that the film had ignited a bidding war among distributors, with every major fall festival reportedly keeping close tabs on it. Now Variety confirms the next chapter: Focus Features has acquired ELSINORE for the U.S. and a swath of international territories, setting the stage for a fall release built around a full awards campaign. Sources tell Variety that programmers at Venice, Telluride, Toronto, and New York are all circling the title, though where exactly it will make its premiere is still being sorted out.

The real headline, though, might be Andrew Scott. According to Variety’s sources and several industry executives, Scott isn’t just in the Best Actor conversation, he’s being talked about as the current frontrunner, putting him on a collision course with Tom Cruise, who’s chasing his first Oscar nomination for DIGGER. Scott plays acclaimed British actor Ian Charleson, known for CHARIOTS OF FIRE, with ELSINORE zeroing in on the final years of Charleson’s life and his now-legendary 1989 stage performance in HAMLET, delivered while he was seriously ill with AIDS. It’s the kind of role that tends to draw awards attention, and if the buzz holds, this could be the performance that finally gets Scott his overdue recognition.

He’s not carrying the film alone either. ELSINORE also stars Olivia Colman, Johnny Flynn, Joe Locke, and Billy Piper, with Piper in particular drawing praise for her work. Between the ensemble and the subject matter, the film is already being floated as a likely multi-category Oscar nominee and a possible Best Picture contender, though with the festival lineup still unconfirmed, it’s early days yet. Still, all signs point to ELSINORE being one of the titles to watch as the season takes shape.

The sleeper hit of 2026 has officially made the leap from cinema to your living room, and it wasted no time making an impression. PRESSURE, the gripping WWII drama-thriller directed by Anthony Maras, arrived on PVOD on June 16th and almost immediately emerged as one of the most popular titles on home video. The film hit theatres in the United States on May 29th, and while it never quite secured the kind of wide nationwide release enjoyed by tentpole titles, it made every screen count. It grossed over $15 million at the box office, surpassing the domestic runs of older WWII titles such as NUREMBERG and LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA, and generating the kind of genuine word-of-mouth awareness that money simply cannot buy.

The film stars Andrew Scott as RAF Group Captain James Stagg and Brendan Fraser as General Dwight D. Eisenhower, unfolding across the tense 72 hours before D-Day as the two men face an impossible decision — launch the largest seaborne invasion in history, or risk losing the war altogether. The ensemble is rounded out by Kerry Condon, Damian Lewis, and Chris Messina, but it is Scott’s performance that has drawn the most attention, and rightly so. PRESSURE holds an 86% critics score and a remarkable 95% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, with the site’s consensus noting that the film finds a fresh angle on one of the most dramatised days in military history, with Scott’s simmering performance at its thrilling core. 

Andrew Scott, the celebrated actor known for his transformative performances in FLEABAG, SHERLOCK, ALL OF US STRANGERS, and RIPLEY, is now stepping behind the camera to shape the future of filmmaking. In a significant evolution of the Redbreast Unhidden platform, Scott is deepening his partnership with the prestigious initiative, bringing his discerning eye and commitment to creative exploration to a curated selection of emerging talent. The award represents more than just recognition—it embodies a shared vision between Scott and Redbreast to illuminate the next generation of filmmakers and uncover the cinematic gems that might otherwise remain hidden from broader audiences.

Presented officially at the renowned SXSW festival, the Redbreast Unhidden Award honors one outstanding filmmaker from a carefully selected shortlist of short film finalists, offering winners not merely accolades but tangible support to propel their careers forward. The inaugural winner in 2025, Andy Reid for BRIEF SOMEBODIES, set an inspiring precedent for what this award could mean for emerging voices in cinema. This year, the competition has grown even more compelling. Scott has meticulously curated a shortlist featuring five original works that demonstrate the bold storytelling and innovative vision the award celebrates: CAN I PUT YOU ON HOLD by James Cutler, VISITORS by Cali’ Minnie’ Schedeen, WE WERE HERE by Pranav Bhasin, IMAGO by Ariel Zengotita, and WINTER CEREMONY by Sidi Wang.

Each film represents a distinct artistic perspective and the kind of fearless creative ambition that Scott himself has come to exemplify throughout his acting career. In a new interview with THE GLOSS, Scott talks about where he’s at in his life and his love of supporting creatives.