Andrew Scott says acting “emancipated” him from shame about being gay

Andrew Scott has opened up about how acting helped “emancipate” him from shame around being gay.

The out actor costars with Normal People’s Paul Mescal in out director Andrew Haigh’s highly anticipated new film All of Us Strangers. The two leading men talked with The New York Times this week, and Scott spoke about accessing his residual internalized homophobia to play his character, Adam, in All of Us Strangers.

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Actor Andrew Scott from ‘Sherlock’ is done with being called ‘openly gay’

“You’re never described as openly gay at a party.”

“I’m happy to be able to say that to be emancipated from shame has been genuinely the biggest achievement of my life,” Scott, who came out publicly in 2013, said. “For a long time, I have felt very comfortable with myself, but it doesn’t take much to go back there — something a taxi driver can say can still wound you. If he might say, ‘You’ve got a wife?’ You could go, ‘No, I don’t,’ or is that sort of a lie by omission? I think the challenge was to undo the work and go to that place where you feel frightened.”

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Scott, who worked steadily as a character actor for decades before achieving leading man status with his role in the second season of Fleabag, added that acting was what helped him free himself from shame.

“When I was a kid, I started doing elocution lessons because I had a really bad lisp,” he recalled. “But eventually it was speech and drama classes. I was so shy and terrified, but then someone would say, ‘Get up and do an improvisation,’ and some part of me felt… free, and I loved it.”

“When I was 18 or 19, I was playing gay parts but I wasn’t out,” Scott continued. “A lot of people within the industry were queer, so I was surrounded by them and then, bit by bit, started to feel confident.”

“To make something like [All of Us Strangers], it moves me, because I never thought that I’d get a chance to expose myself so much in a film like this or for it to be in such a trusting environment with such brilliant colleagues,” he added.

The film, which opens in U.S. theaters on December 22, is already a hit with critics and has generated Oscar buzz around both Scott and Mescal. Scott has already been nominated for an Independent Spirit Award for his lead performance in the film.