Andrew Scott Kicks Off Awards Season With ‘Elsinore’ Premiere at London Film Festival

If this year’s awards season already has a face, it’s starting to look a lot like Andrew Scott’s. The 49-year-old actor closed out Wednesday evening (October 7) on the red carpet outside London’s Royal Festival Hall, where his new film Elsinore premiered as the opening night gala of the 2026 London Film Festival. And whatever else this festival ends up being about — the discoveries, the surprise hits, the arguments over which debutante will land a distribution deal — the drumbeat around Scott is hard to miss. He walked into that gala as one of the early names on every Best Actor shortlist, and judging by the turnout, the industry walked in with him.

Scott was joined on the carpet by co-star Olivia Colman, which is the kind of pairing that does half the publicity work by itself. Two of Britain and Ireland’s most decorated actors, shoulder to shoulder, at the festival’s biggest night of the year — it looked easy, and that’s exactly the point. These are performers who have spent decades making difficult things look effortless, and Elsinore appears to be asking them to do it one more time, in front of an audience that has come specifically to watch them try.

A proper opening-night crowd

This wasn’t a quiet little arthouse launch tucked into a side venue. The guest list for the Elsinore premiere read like a casting director’s dream notebook. Alongside Scott and Colman, the premiere drew Billie Piper, Johnny Flynn, Luke Thompson, David Dawson, Matthew Beard, Joe Locke, Sadie Soverall, Monica Dolan, Louis Healy, Kadiff Kirwan and Jamie Bogyo. That’s a lot of firepower for one red carpet — veterans, rising stars and a couple of names that feel about six months away from being everywhere.

Billie Piper, for what it’s worth, won the fashion notes of the evening, at least the ones that matter to the style desks. She arrived in an Emilia Wickstead dress with Paula Rowan gloves, Christian Louboutin shoes and David Morris earrings — a full look that photographed beautifully and reminded everyone that Piper, after a career of zigzags, has settled into being one of the most reliably interesting dressers on any carpet she bothers to attend. The rest of the cast kept it sharp and celebratory, which is what you do when the whole point of the evening is that the film industry has turned up to congratulate itself and mean it.

Here’s the thing about how these opening night galas actually work. The film that gets the slot is never an accident. Programmers choose it because it sets a tone — ambitious, prestige-adjacent, emotionally legible. Putting Elsinore there, with this cast and this subject, is the festival saying: we’re serious this year. Watch this film.

What Elsinore is actually about

So what is the film? The official synopsis describes it as “the deeply emotional and inspirational true story of Ian Charleson, a gifted actor whose greatest challenge becomes his greatest triumph.” Charleson, the synopsis continues, faces his own mortality “with unflinching honesty, wit, and grace,” and the performance he gives — courageous, in the synopsis’s word — becomes a source of healing and inspiration for everyone around him.

For anyone who needs the context: Ian Charleson is one of those actors whose name lands differently depending on how old you are. To film history, he is Eric Liddell in Chariots of Fire, the Scottish missionary sprinter who ran for God and won gold at the 1924 Paris Olympics. Charleson played him in 1981 and became, overnight, the kind of overnight success that takes a decade of stage work to build. He was a fixture of British theatre — classical roles, sharp comedy, the full repertoire — and he died in 1990, at just 40 years old. That he died young, and that his final performances carried the weight of someone who knew exactly what was happening to him, is the emotional engine the film is built on. It’s the kind of story that either earns its big feelings or collapses under them. There is no middle ground, and the festival’s programmers clearly believe Scott and company found the right side of the line.

Behind the camera, Elsinore is directed by Simon Stone, with a screenplay by Stephen Beresford from an idea by Ethan Silverman. Stone has spent his career bouncing between theatre and film with a restlessness that suits a project like this — he knows how to handle actors, and more importantly, he knows how to let them go too far and then pull them back. The film hits theaters on November 20, which plants it squarely in the middle of the awards corridor. Nobody releases a film about a beloved dead actor in late November without thinking about what comes after.

The awards chatter isn’t exactly subtle

Let’s be honest about the elephant on the red carpet: people are already talking about Andrew Scott as a Best Actor frontrunner for this. And it’s not hard to see why the math works. The performance is reportedly the kind of transformation awards voters love — real person, real suffering, real grace, and a character whose job (actor) lets the performance comment on itself without being cute about it. Voters eat that up. They always have.

Then there’s the Scott of it all. His last few years have been a masterclass in range. The “hot priest” of Fleabag could have typecast a lesser actor into a decade of charming vicars, but Scott went the other way: the aching, quiet devastation of All of Us Strangers, the chilly calculation of Ripley, and a one-man stage Vanya that had critics reaching for words they don’t usually use. He’s 49, he’s at the absolute peak of his powers, and he has the particular credibility of an actor who never coasted. If Elsinore gives him even half the material those roles gave him, the Best Actor conversation is going to get very loud, very fast.

Olivia Colman being along for the ride doesn’t hurt either. There’s a gravitational logic to awards campaigns: one undeniable performance pulls attention toward the whole film, and Colman — who has her own shelf of trophies and her own history of stealing films she was only supposed to support — is exactly the kind of co-star who makes a campaign feel like a movement instead of a push.

The role, the fear, and the Variety interview

One of the more interesting threads around Elsinore has nothing to do with the red carpet. In a recent interview with Variety, Scott talked about the fears he used to carry as a gay actor — specifically the worry that audiences wouldn’t accept him playing straight love interests. “I guess there was a fear that I wouldn’t be able to get cast in those roles,” he said. He pushed back on the whole premise with the exasperated logic of someone who has had this argument too many times: audiences know the people waiting at the stage door after his plays knew his sexuality and didn’t care. And he dismissed the underlying assumption with a laugh — the idea that an audience is somehow too simple to understand that acting is pretending, as he put it, is its own kind of prejudice. “That’s just prejudice,” he said of anyone who can’t get past it. “And we won’t cater to those people.”

It’s a small moment in an interview, but it lands with extra weight next to a film like Elsinore. Ian Charleson’s story is, among other things, the story of an actor who kept working at the highest level while carrying something enormous in private. Scott playing him — openly gay, now, and increasingly uninterested in anyone’s permission — feels less like casting than like a correction. The profession has come a long way since Charleson’s time. Scott’s career is, in some sense, the proof.

What happens next

The festival machine now does what it does: reviews land, the trades file their dispatches, the word “tour de force” gets its annual workout. Scott will do the rounds — the panels, the portraits, the politely evasive interviews where he says he doesn’t think about awards and everyone nods because they know better. Olivia Colman will do them too, probably funnier ones. And the film itself will have to survive the thing every festival darling has to survive: the long, quiet months between the premiere high and the November 20 release, when the only thing keeping a movie alive is whether people keep talking about it.

If Wednesday night was any indication, people are going to keep talking. An opening night gala at Royal Festival Hall, a stacked cast on the carpet, a true story with genuine emotional stakes and a leading man at the top of his game — that’s not a launch, that’s a statement of intent. Awards season doesn’t officially start for a while yet. Someone forgot to tell Andrew Scott.

Source: Just Jared