Andrew Scott was "really, genuinely excited, shocked and surprised" when he won the Best Actor statuette at the 67th Evening Standard Awards last weekend for his performance in Simon Stephens' Vanya, a one-person adaptation of Chekhov's play. "Our producers Wessex Grove decided they would put something that was a bit crazy and not necessarily commercial into a West End Theatre," says the 47-year-old when we speak.
"And it was Real It's surprising that so many people came to see it, because it's an unusual idea and it requires a lot of hard work from the audience. But there were people who said they came from Venezuela and New Zealand to see it."
Many younger fans of Scott's TV appearances as Moriarty in Sherlock, or the Hot Priest in Fleabag, also came to see him play eight different characters, male and female, of different ages and social channels, in Vanya.
Starved of the usual camaraderie of an acting company, he chatted with many of those fans at the stage door, and he considers his TV fame "absolutely a blessing." Just doing eight shows a week almost killed him, he says, and his body "collapsed" after last night.
The show proved to be a virtuoso display of acting skill, but risked looking like a gimmick or an exercise in vanity. "Yes, exactly," he says. "There had to be a reason for it beyond what was possible for the actor." And he explains that the concept, and the justification for it, came about because of a mistake.
Stephens had written a "fairly standard version of the play with a normal-sized cast" and he, Scott and director Sam Yates read it to find out which character would best suit Scott. He accidentally played both the main character and his nemesis, arguing with himself.
"It became clear that all of these characters think their particular experience is exclusive to them, but in reality their pain and vulnerability are very similar. So the idea that we all contain multitudes, people who are seemingly opposite of each other, and are actually all embodied by the same actor... I think it speaks to our idea now in this current culture where we're all obsessed with identity, but actually we are. they are all much more alike than we allow ourselves to believe."
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As Stephens noted, when he writes a play, he plays all the characters in his head. And turning Vanya into a solo show pulled the audience away from what can be a tired familiarity with Chekhov. Scott says he and director Robert Icke had to find analogue techniques for their Hamlet in the Almeida in 2017. "How do you unlearn something that is incredibly famous?" he says.
Hamlet does not know that his father's ghost will appear and then disappear: he does not know how his uncle will react to a dramatized version of his fratricide. Icke said that when Scott felt like he was taking scenes for granted, he had to press "the Famous Play Buzzer" in his head to reset his performance.
Despite his flourishing film career, Scott is a creature of the theater. Born in Dublin to an art teacher mother and a father who worked in an employment agency, he took drama classes to overcome teenage shyness, dropped out of art school to study acting and then dropped out of drama school to act at the Abbey Theater in Dublin. "I love the idea of grown adults deliberately going into the theater and sitting in the dark and saying, 'I'd like you to tell me a story,' knowing it's not true," he smiles.
He moved to London at the age of 22, where his first major stage role was in Conor McPherson's Dublin Carol. Simon Stephens saw that piece and eventually wrote Sea Wall, Birdland and now Vanya for Scott. Other theatrical highlights included David Hare's The Vertical Hour for Sam Mendes in New York in 2006, and the premiere of Mike Bartlett's Cock opposite Ben Whishaw at the Royal Court in 2009.
After appearing in Noel Coward's Design for Living at the Old Vic in 2009, he returned to both writer and location as the monstrously self-absorbed matinee idol Gary Essendine in Coward's Present Laughter: that performance won him his first Evening Standard Best Actor -price up.
He was unable to attend this year's ceremony because the end of the actors' strike in America meant he suddenly had to fly to LA to resume promotional duties for Andrew Haigh's film All of us Strangers. It is a meditation on loneliness and regret; Scott's character lives in a remote tower block and begins a tentative relationship with the only other resident, played by fellow Best Actor nominee Paul Mescal.
Meanwhile, he revisits the ghosts of his parents (Claire Foy and Jamie Bell) who died in a car accident thirty years earlier, and as an adult relives the experience of coming out as a teenager.
"It's incredibly personal for me, and for Andrew, who brought so much vulnerability to it that I didn't really want to act or tell the truth about it," Scott says. "We shot the film in his parents' house, which was extraordinary. I thought, my God, if you lost a tooth, you would have put that tooth under that pillow that that sound engineer is currently eating his Pret A Manger sandwich on. I felt like it had to be some kind of marriage between our two stories somehow, even though I never met Andrew's parents and he never met mine.
Scott publicly came out as gay in 2013 and says that even though his parents were and are loving and supportive, revealing oneself is always difficult.
"A common response beyond extreme acceptance or extreme rejection is that love can cause your parents to say things that are offensive or awkward," he says. 'I call that accidental cruelty. I don't think this is just a gay experience. Within families, because we want to be seen, it affects you when they say things that make you feel unseen."
In an interview to mark his recent announcement as GQ's Man of the Year, he said he had been advised by friends in the industry to keep quiet about his sexuality. "I would say that being authentic, and making the decision to be authentic, was the best thing for my career," he says, but he has always been wary of being defined by his sexuality, and keeps his private life out the boundaries: "I do feel that I have other qualities that I am more proud of than my sexuality. Because, as I always say, it's not a flaw in my character, but it's not a virtue either" (he has actually said this to me in the past, adding that being gay is "not a skill like playing the banjo").
However, he now describes himself as "a practicing bicoastal. I love London, but I miss the sea in Dublin and I visit my parents as much as possible." Likewise, he misses multiculturalism and the arts when he is too far away from London.
"I believe very passionately that London theater can be the best in the world because there is something in our taste, even in commercial theater, that is actually a bit left of centre," he says. "It just has a bit of an edge to it and there's a very sophisticated audience here." Does he hope for a new government next year that takes art seriously? "Absolute."
The Netflix series Ripley, in which he appears as Patricia Highsmith's charming psychopath, is finally coming out this year (it was largely shot under lockdown). But what's next for the man who played Hamlet and the Hot Priest, Moriarty and eight different characters in Vanya? "I honestly don't know," he says. "I think I may have been acting a little too much in recent years... Oh, but I just did an action movie with Cameron Diaz, which was a lot of fun." Now there is versatility.
The 67th Evening Standard Theater Awards, hosted by Lord Lebedev and Ian McKellen, took place on Sunday 19 November at Claridge's.
