24 The Times Magazinendrew Scott is mortified. The actor- formerly Moriarty to Benedict
Cumberbatch’s Sherlock, then
the Hot Priest of Phoebe Waller-
Bridge’s Fleabag, imminently
Colonel John Parry in the BBC’s
adaptation of Philip Pullman’s
His Dark Materials – arrives at the
photographic studio, bang on the
appointed hour, in a fawn cashmere
cardigan with a fine gold chain around his
neck, bemoaning “this terrible, terrible eye
infection, which is making me so self-
conscious. I’m so sorry. It isn’t that you’ve
massively upset me before we’ve even started.
It’s so annoying. But anyway...”
Scott, 44, is small, vivid, wiry and
garrulously Irish, with a face that is not
handsome so much as mesmerising, intense,
sharply boned, symmetrical, startlingly
expressive. Sequences of emotions so subtle
and complicated that I can’t begin to identify
or keep up with them ruffle his brow from
moment to moment. And, yup, the whole
thing is rather disrupted by his left eye. This
is no light kiss of conjunctivitis. It’s a swollen,
red, perma-weeping situation that engulfs the
whole socket. Scott turns his face two thirds
on to me, so the infection is largely hidden,
which would probably help if we weren’t sitting
in a brightly lit hair and make-up room with a
massive, inescapable mirror fixed to one wall.
“Oh God,” Scott says every time he catches
sight of his reflection.
Stress?
“Let’s be honest,” he says. “Let’s not
skirt around the issue. It’s being overworked
and...” Scott’s eye begins weeping. “Oh
my goodness. I am so sorry. Really, really
very sorry.”
Wanna wear my sunglasses, I ask, holding
them out to him.
“That would be a bit more weird, wouldn’t
it? I actually did think about that in the taxi,
but I thought that would be some sort of
weird and screwed Invisible Man-type thing.
I mean, it couldn’t be worse. And then we
have to go and get our photograph taken. It’ll
be one of those pictures where, you know,
those creepy pictures... Of people crying?”
That’s what Photoshop’s for, I say.
“Anyway. Let’s just ignore it.”
I wonder if it’s particularly hard to walk
around with an eye infection at a point in
time where you’re not merely famous, as
Scott is – a star of stage, screen and Bond film,
winner of multiple awards, including, as of
barely two weeks ago, a Best Actor Olivier
for Present Laughter at the Old Vic – but
specifically famous for being sexy.
In 2019, Andrew Scott became synonymous
with, well, sex. While playing a character
technically known as the Priest, whom
the general public instantly renamed the
Hot Priest, the spiritual support turned
transgressive love interest of Phoebe Waller-
Bridge’s supremely popular Fleabag, Scott
became a cypher for the nation’s more exotic
desires. A deliciously contentious pin-up.
Ground zero on an earnest social media
debate about whether the Priest’s relationship
with Fleabag should be considered abusive,
power imbalanced, “problematic”. And that
was just for starters.
The Priest’s sexual iconography extended
far beyond the limits of the show, becoming
the subject of internet memes and real-life
merchandise (visit online retailer Etsy for
your £12 Hot Priest mug emblazoned with an
illustration of Scott in priest’s robes, alongside
the word “kneel”, a reference to a pivotal
moment between the show’s lead characters,
which takes place in a confession box, the
climax of which, assuming you haven’t already
seen it, you could probably take a stab at).
There was an unprecedented upsurge in young
worshippers, and women started bombarding
social media “influencer” the Rev Chris Lee of
west London with nude photographs. There
was much foetid fan fiction.
To be publicly defined by so much sex, as
Scott still is, a year and a half after Fleabag
concluded, and then to be encumbered
by something as visibly unsexy as an eye
infection, I can see how that might make
a chap self-conscious.
Scott isn’t here to rake up all that old Hot
Priest stuff, mind. He’s here to talk about the
second series of His Dark Materials, a lush,
expensive fantasy drama based on the Philip
Pullman books, jewel in the crown of the
BBC’s autumn schedule. The series was filmed
through 2019 and the beginning of 2020 and
had all but wrapped before lockdown. Good
timing, as it turned out, because the extensive
post-production processes, unlike shooting,
could be completed in isolation.
Scott’s Colonel John Parry is an explorer,
the missing father of the central character,
14-year-old Will Parry. He’s a man who
slipped into a parallel universe some years
earlier, acquired a “daemon” – an exterior
animal-formed expression of his soul, a female
osprey called Sayan Kötör, voiced with public-
pleasing symmetry by Phoebe Waller-Bridge- and never found a way back to “our” world
and his son. I speak as a fan of the books,
which you might describe as a darker,
A
Playing the Priest in FleabagWith Sian Clifford and Phoebe Waller-Bridge at the EmmysWith Indira Varma in Present Laughter at the Old Vic, 2019BBC, MANUEL HARLAN, SHUTTERSTOCK
‘I LOVE CHILDREN AND I HAD
A VERY HAPPY CHILDHOOD. BUT
I ALSO FEEL, IF I DON’T HAVE
KIDS, THAT’S ALL RIGHT’