Andrew Scott Looks Back on 'All of Us Strangers,' Weighs In on Who Should Play Queer Roles

Out actor Andrew Scott opened up to UK newspaper The Guardian about the experience of making Andrew Haigh's 2023 film "All of Us Strangers" and offered his take on whether straight, cisgender actors ought to play queer characters.

The "Ripley" star had just finished a year's work on the Netflix limited series when he began work on Haigh's latest masterpiece. "I'd get the tube to work every day," Scott reminisced. "I just loved being back in this sort of hustle-bustle excitement of London in the summer."

"And to do that with these incredibly beautiful people and just to play love in that extraordinary way, and to wear my own clothes, and to do that with Andrew Haigh, was amazing," he added.

Scott also brimmed with warm words for his castmates Jamie Bell and Claire Foy, who played the long-dead parents of his screenwriter character, Adam, and discussed theories about whether Adam was imagining his midlife interactions with his parents – "Adam's been in a sort of purgatory because he had this terrible tragedy that happened to him when he was a young boy," Scott noted – or whether they actually were visiting him from beyond the grave. The interviewer even floated the notion that Adam might be dead, which Scott shot down.

He had even warmer words for another castmate, Paul Mescal, who plays a neighbor, Harry, with whom Adam becomes romantically involved.

"Paul and I became very close during the filming and we had a great time promoting it," Scott shared. "It doesn't feel like work when it's a film that you adore and you're promoting it with people that you love."

The "Fleabag" star seemed open about most questions, but he hesitated to declare a blanket opinion on the issue of whether queer roles ought to be reserved, by and large, for queer actors.

"I'm always reluctant to give a quick soundbite about that," the 48-year-old Irish actor replied.

"Every individual story has to be examined," Scott continued. "There are certainly much more opportunities; the playing field is becoming more even and that has to be considered in every casting decision."

"But people can be very extreme and hysterical," the "Sherlock" actor added. "What is important is that we have representation for everybody, not just in front of the screen, but behind it, so that when somebody is on a set, if you're portraying somebody that's different from you, that somebody can say, 'Well, that's not authentically the way it is.'"

Whether Adam's parents are ghosts getting reacquainted with their now-adult gay son, or figments of the screenwriter's imagination, is up to the viewer to decide; Scott refused to give his opinion on that. But he did, perhaps, give a hint of where he lands on the question in musing that "Love is the most powerful force on Earth and it exists beyond death."

"When you can place those metaphysical and spiritual ideas in a very naturalistic setting, the juxtaposition makes it really intriguing," Scott went on to add, "the idea magic exists even in a lonely high-rise apartment in central London."

Andrew Scott remains a busy actor, as does his "All of Us Strangers" onscreen lover, Paul Mescal. Among no less than half a dozen upcoming projects, Scott will be see in the film "Blue Moon" as composer Oscar Hammerstein II, and he's part of the cast for the third "Knives Out" film, "Wake Up Dead Man," which is slated for release next year.