Elsinore Puts Andrew Scott Inside a Legend's Final Role

A UK trailer for *Elsinore* has arrived, with Andrew Scott playing Ian Charleson as he performed Hamlet at the National Theatre while dying of AIDS.

The film, directed by Simon Stone (*The Dig*) and written by Stephen Beresford (*Pride*), does not ask Scott to play Hamlet. It asks him to play a man playing Hamlet — which is a different and considerably stranger assignment. Ian Charleson's National Theatre run is remembered as one of the great performances in modern British theatre, partly because audiences and critics understood, as he delivered it, that he was gravely ill.

What *Elsinore* is setting up, at least from the trailer and its festival history, is a portrait of performance under the pressure of mortality — the stage as a place where a dying man chose to be seen. The film premiered at Telluride before screening at TIFF, according to The Playlist, which puts it on a recognisable awards-season trajectory.

The casting is pointed. Scott has played Hamlet on stage and carries that weight into this role. Whether the film earns that layering, or collapses under it, is the question no trailer can answer.

About the writer

Dua Mifsud Culture, Fashion & Gen Z Editor

Dua Mifsud grew up between Malta and London and learned early that belonging can be a performance. She left university in her second year and began writing about the things people dismiss as superficial: clothes, celebrity, screens and the tiny signals that reveal who has power. Her brother is the only person she trusts without qualification. Dua reads fashion as language and pop culture as evidence. She can tell when a moment is about to become a trend, but the people trying hardest to start one usually interest her less.

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