Andrew Scott (actor)

Early life and education

Scott was born in Dublin, Ireland. His father, Jim, worked in an employment agency, and his mother, Nora, was an art teacher. He has an older sister, Sarah, a sports coach, and a younger sister, Hannah.

Scott attended Gonzaga College, a private Jesuit Catholic school for boys on the south side of Dublin. He took Saturday classes at a drama school for children, and appeared in two ads on Irish television. At seventeen, he was chosen for a starring role in his first film, Korea. Scott won a bursary to art school, but elected to study drama at Trinity College, Dublin, leaving after six months to join Dublin’s Abbey Theatre. He once stated to the London Evening Standard magazine that he always had a "healthy obsession" with acting.

Career

After filming a small part in Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, Scott worked with film and theater director Karel Reisz in the Gate Theatre, Dublin, production of Long Day's Journey into Night taking the role of Edmund, the younger son, in the Eugene O'Neill play about a tortured American family in the early part of the 20th century. He won Actor of the Year at the Sunday Independent Spirit of Life Arts Awards 1998 and received an Irish Times Theatre Award 1998 nomination for Best Supporting Actor.

Scott appeared in the small part of Michael Blodgett in the film Nora, with Ewan McGregor, and in a television adaptation of Henry James’s The American, alongside Diana Rigg and Matthew Modine, before making his London theatre debut in Conor McPherson’s Dublin Carol with Brian Cox at the Royal Court Theatre. He was then cast in the BAFTA winning drama Longitude, opposite Michael Gambon, and the HBO miniseries Band of Brothers. Scott has described the working atmosphere on Band of Brothers as "awful".

In 2004, he was named one of European Film Promotions' Shooting Stars. After starring in My Life in Film for the BBC, he received his first Olivier award for his role in A Girl in a Car with a Man at The Royal Court, and the Theatregoers' Choice Award for his performance in the National Theatre’s Aristocrats. He then created the roles of the twin brothers in the original Royal Court production of Christopher Shinn’s Dying City, which was later nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. In 2006, he made his Broadway debut opposite Julianne Moore and Bill Nighy in the Music Box Theater production of The Vertical Hour written by David Hare and directed by Sam Mendes, for which he was nominated for a Drama League Award.

In 2008, Scott appeared as Col. William Smith in the HBO miniseries John Adams, opposite Laura Linney and Paul Giamatti. Mamie Gummer, Meryl Streep's daughter, played his sister. In 2009, he appeared in Sea Wall, a one-man show written especially for him by playwright Simon Stephens.

He starred alongside Ben Whishaw, Katherine Parkinson and Paul Jesson in a sell-out run of Cock at the Royal Court in late 2009, a production which won an Olivier Award in 2010. He has been seen in Foyle's War as a prisoner determined to allow himself to hang for a crime he may not have committed, which was described in Slant magazine as a "standout performance." Other film appearances included a role in Chasing Cotards (a short film made for IMAX), the short film, Silent Things and as Paul McCartney in the BBC film Lennon Naked. He also starred in the critically acclaimed 2010 film The Duel.

He is most well known as Sherlock Holmes' nemesis Moriarty in the BBC drama series Sherlock, and he had a guest role in the second series of Garrow's Law playing a gay man on trial for sodomy. In 2010, he appeared with Lisa Dillon and Tom Burke in the Old Vic comedy about a three-way love affair, Noël Coward's Design for Living.

In 2011, he played the lead role of Julian in Ben Power's adaptation of Henrik Ibsen's epic Emperor and Galilean at the National Theatre in London.

He had a part in BBC2's original drama The Hour as Adam Le Ray, a failed, secretly gay, actor.

In addition to his stage and TV work, Scott is also known for his voice acting in radio plays and audiobooks, such as the roles of Jay Gatsby in Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce's Ulysses.

In November 2013, Scott took part in the National Theatre's 50 Years on Stage, a theatrical event which consisted of excerpts from many plays over the National's fifty-year run and was broadcast live on television. Scott performed a scene from Angels in America by Tony Kushner alongside Dominic Cooper. Scott has described the experience as 'overwhelming', adding, 'What a night and what an honour to be there.'

Recently Scott took to the stage in Birdland, written by Simon Stephens and directed by Carrie Cracknell at the Royal Court Theatre, playing the central character of Paul, a rock star at the pinnacle of his career on the verge of a breakdown. Scott received positive reviews for the performance, with comments such as 'beautifully played' and [he] ' pulls off the brilliant trick of being totally dead behind the eyes and fascinating at the same time, an appalling creature who's both totem and symptom'.

In 2015, he appeared in the James Bond film Spectre, as Max Denbigh, a member of the British government intent on shutting down the Double-0 section of MI6.

Scott works with the charity IdeasTap mentoring young actors and helping to start their careers.

Personal life

Scott is openly gay, and has commented that "mercifully, these days people don't see being gay as a character flaw. But nor is it a virtue, like kindness. Or a talent, like playing the banjo. It's just a fact. Of course, it's part of my make-up, but I don't want to trade on it." On being asked as to how he prepared his accent for his BBC2 drama Legacy, where he played a soviet diplomat, he said: "There isn't a huge amount of footage of Russians speaking English as a second language, so I started looking at Vladimir Putin videos on YouTube. But then Putin introduced anti-gay legislation this summer so—being a gay person—I switched to Rudolf Nureyev videos instead. It was another Nureyev defection of sorts!"

Scott was ranked at number 22 in The Independent's Rainbow List 2014: 101 lesbian, bisexual, gay and transgender people who 'make a real difference'.