Times Online 2004 interview

[soophelia.livejournal.com]

Television: Risen without tracer [December 19, 2004]
Since Band of Brothers, Andrew Scott has battled to the top, says Mick Heaney
As he stood amid the detritus of the battlefield, Andrew Scott wondered at the futility of it all. He felt entirely out of place, at odds with the aggressive uniformed men who supposedly were his comrades, harassed by the hard-bitten old soldiers who kept barking orders at him. This was not what he had signed up for. He wanted to be an actor.

When Scott first landed the part on Band of Brothers, the second world war television epic, it had been a different story. For the young Irish actor, playing the doomed, foul-mouthed GI Private John “Cowboy” Hall was the kind of job he normally relished. He loved diverse, challenging roles, with which he could explore his craft: his previous screen job had been as an 18th-century naval officer, in the period drama Longitude. But when the shooting began, Scott’s enthusiasm waned.


“I actually had quite a miserable time on Band of Brothers,” says Scott. “The other cast members had all been to boot c meanwhile I had been in the theatre, so I couldn’t go. And they were all in character all the time: you’d be on the way to the set with these guys all talking to their agents, and when they’d get out of the car they would greet each other in Boston accents. And I remember thinking, I thought he was from Cornwall.

“They’d ask your name and I’d say, ‘I’m Andrew’. And they’d shout, ‘What’s your character name?’ To me that’s just completely unnecessary. And there was a Vietnam vet there making sure you held your weapon properly or else you had to do 50 press ups or whatever. I just found it ridiculous.

“That’s why I find research really distracting, kind of terrifying and, for me, irrelevant. I think it’s weird when people say they want to transform themselves into somebody else: it’s impossible not to bring aspects of yourself into every part.”

Scott has always tried to be his own man. Over the past decade, the 28-year-old Dubliner has played a dizzying array of roles on stage and screen but he has brought his own introspective sensitivity and intensity to them: even his supposedly comic character in the BBC sitcom My Life in Film has a faintly haunted quality. Scott may have had an unhappy experience on Band of Brothers but, if anything, it has sharpened his desire not only to push himself as an actor, but also to do it on his own terms.

“What would drive me definitely would be to do as many different jobs as possible,” he says. “Without sounding like I think too highly of myself, I don’t just want to do something I’ve done before. It’s meant that people sometimes don’t know who you are or you’re out of pocket but I think I have managed it.”

Of late, Scott’s approach certainly seems to have been paying off. Having won an Irish Film and Television Award (Ifta) for best actor for his role in Robert Quinn’s 2003 thriller Dead Bodies, Scott is now on the cusp of primetime television success with My Life in Film. The series, which features Scott and co-star Kris Marshall as a couple of deluded, underachieving film-makers, is currently being broadcast on the digital channel BBC3, but a move to BBC2 next month brings the likelihood of a far greater audience.

But while Scott is enthusiastic about the new show’s premise, which combines the misadventures of its hapless heroes with pastiches of cinema classics, he seems far more lukewarm about the possibility of the series becoming a hit. It is partly because he is wary about being identified in the public imagination with a single role — “It would be a big fear of mine if you were in something and people started calling you by your character name,” he says — but his anxiety seems motivated by more than a professional need not to be typecast. Only by constantly pushing himself as an actor, he suggests, can he really be himself.

“I suppose acting is a bit of a mask, but it’s given me a lot of confidence,” he says. “I’m quite shy actually, though you can’t really say you’re shy when you have 300 people looking at you up on stage. But it’s like going into very extreme situations, exploring all the different parts of your personality but remaining intact. Because I’ve been doing it since I was very small I think it comes very naturally to me. So I am shy, but not as much as I used to be.”

Shy or not, Scott has always been drawn to acting. Growing up in a comfortable middle-class Dublin family, the stage proved a powerful lure early on: happily enrolled in drama classes, at eight years old he was appearing in television ads for porridge oats. On leaving Gonzaga, the exclusive Jesuit school in south Dublin, he started drama studies at Trinity College. But his instinct for acting proved stronger: having made his screen debut in Cathal Black’s film Korea at the age of 17, Scott was soon picking up enough theatre work for him to give up his studies.

“There were opportunities coming up in the Abbey, and that’s where you’re going to learn,” he says. “Having been at quite an academic school, the idea of picking up a pen again was too much for me.”

Scott soon became a regular presence on the Dublin stage, appearing in plays as diverse as Karel Reisz’s production of Long Day’s Journey into Night and Tom Kilroy’s drama The Secret Fall of Constance Wilde, in which he played Oscar Wilde’s nemesis, Lord Alfred Douglas. Screen roles followed too, such as the Tale of Sweety Barrett, but when Scott landed his role in Longitude, he felt the time was right to try his luck in London.

Since moving over in 1999, Scott has built on his reputation as a versatile stage actor; starting with a role in Conor McPherson’s Dublin Carol, he has gone on to play such different parts as a 19th-century Parisian rent boy in Original Sin, a Russian anti-hero in Playing the Victim and even twin brothers in The Coming World. Indeed, he is currently drawing acclaim at London’s Royal Court theatre as a narcissistic gay clubber in Rob Evans’s drama A Girl in a Car with a Man.

Given his desire for creative freedom, one believes Scott when he talks about the importance of the theatre to him; but his idealism is tempered by economic realism.

“I don’t think I’d do a television job just for the purpose of raising my profile, but it’s very hard to make a living in the theatre,” he says.

Scott’s wry streak is not the only thing that sets him apart from many of his peers. As his experience on Band of Brothers showed, he has little time for his profession’s more affected traits: though he tries to avoid Irish roles, he tends to audition in his south Dublin accent rather than adopt an English voice. And though he enjoys expressing himself in front of an audience, he shudders at the thought of celebrity on the scale of Colin Farrell, whom he beat to pick up his Ifta.

For the moment, the prospect of such success may be a distant concern. Of course, if My Life in Film clicks with the public, Scott could yet find himself on the path to fame. He has the talent to make a bigger name for himself, though whether he has the inclination may be another matter. Scott doesn’t want anything to get in the way of his acting; he wants to remain his own man.

“I’m very protective of my personal life because I don’t think it’s in any way relevant for the kind of career that I want. I’m not judgmental about other people doing it, but for me, it’s completely irrelevant.

“But I’ve never considered not acting, which is weird. It’s something that is very much part of me. I kind of suit being an actor: it makes me very happy.”

Source: Times Online