The Times Magazine 37“Well, there were Catholic priests in my
life,” he says. “None of whom I wanted to
have sex with.”
Does it amuse Scott to know he inspired
a mass fetishising of priestly ranks? That in
2019, the Hot Priest would make, “Can you
have sex with a Catholic priest?” one of the
most googled terms of the year?
“Absolutely f***ing mental,” he says.
Homosexuality wasn’t legalised in Ireland
until 1993, when Scott was 16.
“I always think, if I’d had a boyfriend then,
which I definitely did not...”
No?
“No.”
He knew he was gay, though?
“No. No, no, no, no!”
Was he suppressing it or not thinking
about it?
“I would say suppressing. Definitely
suppressing. I don’t believe people just
don’t think about it.”
An upbeat, cheesy jazz remix of something
or other starts playing outside the room.
“Oooh, this is the soundtrack for this bit
of the interview,” says Scott. He wiggles his
shoulders to the music.I switch to strict dominatrix interviewer
mode. Focus, I say. You were about to tell
me something good.
“Oh, shit, was I? OK. I think what’s really
insidious is that people don’t ask you about
sex or... People wouldn’t say, ‘Are you gay or
are you [straight]?’ And the lack of directness
is very damaging. They just didn’t go there.”
Does he think his family, friends, the people
closest to him knew then that he was gay?
“No,” he says. “I don’t think they did know.
Or maybe they have a suspicion, but they
think, I want to be respectful, so I’m not going
to ask about that. Then [when you do come
out], people say, ‘Oh, I’m glad.’ You know?
If you do talk about it. So I suppose what
I feel now is, talking about sex or sexuality
is important. Really important.”
Having said that, “There’s still getting rid
of the shame. In a situation like this, 10 or
15 years ago, I would have been...” He fakes
shock, horror. “Oh no! Polly’s just asked me
about [he switches to a whisper] that.”
Scott will talk about his sex life only
notionally. No specifics. For 15 years, between
2001 and 2016, he was in a relationship
with the actor turned screenwriter Stephen
Beresford (Scott starred in Beresford’s 2014
film Pride). Ever since, he’s refused to answer
questions about his romantic life.
And he’s not going to talk about it now,
I presume.“No.”
What if we talk about it opaquely?
“OK.”
Where does he see himself, domestically, in
an ideal world? Married with kids whom he’ll,
I dunno, adopt or have via surrogacy?
“I like it. It’s bold. Am I going to adopt or...?”
Get a surrogate?
“I definitely think that’s something I would
be open to.”
Great, I say, with blatant sarcasm. Thanks.
How specific.
“Ha! I’m sorry. OK. Have I got any children
at the moment? No. How can I... [explain]?
OK. I was with a friend of mine in Dublin...”
His partner?
“No, no, no. Not my partner. Ah ha. I see
what you were...”
Teasing. Yes.
“Ha! Yes. So, I was with a friend in Dublin
and we were walking around and he was
looking at apartments and I was like, ‘What
about this place here?’ You know? And he
said, ‘No,’ and I said, ‘Why not?’ and he said,
‘I don’t live a heteronormative life, so I don’t
want a heteronormative house.’ ”
What’s a heteronormative house?“Two up, two down thing. He goes, ‘I can
live in a loft or a weird space. I don’t need
those things.’ He was so proud of it. He really
owned it. I think where a lot of one’s pain
comes from is when you go, ‘I should want
that.’ And so, to answer your question
opaquely, I have kids I adore. I love children,
genuinely, and I had a very happy childhood.
But I also feel, if I don’t have kids, that’s all
right. I think I would’ve attached a lot of shame
beforehand, with not living a particularly
heteronormative life... Even with being
gay, there’s a sort of way of being gay that’s
acceptable. And I don’t feel that any more.”
He feels you can be unacceptably gay?
“Exactly. Exactly!”
I ask when shame shifted for him
and Scott says it was when Ireland voted
overwhelmingly in favour of same-sex
marriage in the 2015 referendum, which felt,
he says, “like acceptance, genuinely. And I
remember going out to this gay bar in Dublin
and this girl came up to me, this cool Dublin
girl, and she said, ‘What are you doing here?
You need to go down to, I don’t know, blah,
blah, this bar in some park.’ She was saying,
‘This isn’t the right gay bar for you. This is
some shit gig,’ when the fact I’m in a gay bar
in Ireland [at all] is a miracle to me, and then
some person with a half-shaved head is telling
me, ‘No, you need to go somewhere cooler.’ ”
His left eye starts weeping again.“I’m so happy about that,” he says. “Even
though I’m crying.”
I ask Scott if he has a game plan when
picking roles, if he plots his course from
Sherlock villain to Bond quasi-villain (he
played Max Denbigh in Spectre) to sex icon,
and, if so, what next? “No. Jesus, no,” he says.
We talk about the totalitarianism of social
media, which he isn’t on, and share a mutual
despair over it. “I thought it was something
one would associate with the right, but actually,
now it’s [the left] that is very ‘you’re this’ or
‘you’re that’. I find that quite frightening. It
actually makes me feel ferocious.”
Is he not worried about being cancelled, of
somehow saying the “wrong” thing, according
to Twitter sensitivities, then having a thousand
voices mobilised against him, demanding his
firing, in the style of JK Rowling?
“I’m not,” he says. “I refuse to be. A very
intelligent person I was talking to recently was
writing a book and he said, ‘I’m going to get a
sensitivity expert to have a look. I don’t want
to get cancelled.’ I found that frightening.”
Is he rich? “Rich is the absence of worry
about money,” he says. He can’t remember
the last time he worried about money.That must be nice.
“Of course it f***ing is. I think it’s a
miracle. I really do. I was working in a French
theatre in London for nothing – none of us
was working for anything – and I remember
the artistic director of the theatre talking
about the fact we weren’t earning any money
as some sort of virtue. I remember feeling
really annoyed about that, like this isn’t good.”
This leads to an inevitable conversation
about how the arts are suffering with Covid,
including a segue down the Fatima route, the
much shared government advert that depicted
a young ballerina and suggested she retrain
in something called cyber. “Her name’s not
even Fatima,” Scott rails. “I think she’s called
Desire’e. From New York.”
I mean to ask him about his experience
of filming The Pursuit of Love with Lily James
and Dominic West, stars of their own recent
off-screen micro-scandal in Rome, just in case
he lets any scurrilous insight slip, but our
time’s up and it’s not as if Scott has much
form on offering up scurrilous insight anyway.
Still, I feel grateful to him for meeting
me halfway on the other stuff. And so I say
goodbye to Andrew Scott, the UK’s foremost
gay heterosexual lapsed Catholic faux-priest
lust icon with a troublesome eye infection. nHis Dark Materials starts tomorrow on
OPENING SPREAD: GROOMING BY JOHN CHRISTOPHER AT TERRI MANDUCA USING SHAKEUP COSMETICS. PAGE 22: JACKET, £2,490, AND SHIRT, £695, ALEXANDERMCQUEEN.COM; CHAIN, SCOTT’S OWN. PAGE 23: VEST AND CHAIN, SCOTT’S OWN BBC One at 8pm and is available on BBC iPlayer
‘ACTING TO ME IS NOT PRETENDING TO BE SOMEONE ELSE. IT’S WHO I ACTUALLY AM’
Andrew Scott Continued from page 25