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The Telluride Film Festival casts a wide net, as almost all festivals of its ilk do, but if it has had any speciality that stands out among many, it might be the well-earned tearjerker. There is as much crying at Telluride every
year as there isn’t in baseball, but with the festival’s emphasis on top-line prestige fare, returning patrons look forward to going through some emotional catharsis in the mountains every Labor Day weekend. Among the 2026 lineup, probably no film got passholders any deeper in their feels than “Elsinore,” starring Andrew Scott and directed by Simon Stone. Their remarkable film dramatizes the true-life story of a well-known British actor — Ian Charleson, of “Chariots of Fire” fame — who died at the peak of the AIDS crisis in 1990, but who spent his last months and weeks staying alive long enough to achieve the life goal of playing Hamlet at the National Theatre.
There won’t be a dry eye in the house when this goes wide, as the cliche goes, but there also won’t be an untickled funny bone, given a performance by Scott that’s almost as drolly funny as it is passionate and heartrending (with no small help from writer Stephen Beresford). And there won’t be any un-warmed hearts among any viewers with a deep love for the life of the theater, since the movie serves as a love letter to stagecraft and community, on top of of most obviously being an ode to the seeming indomitability of Charleson as he bravely forestalled his final bow.
Stone’s long history as an actor before he became a premier stage director in Australia and then London — before finally moving into film — deeply informs every legit-loving moment of “Elsinore.” Variety spoke with him the day after his new film unspooled in Telluride, where he enjoyed a crowd waiting to give him and Scott yet another ovation in the lobby, some time after the credits rolled. Under his direction, Scott is an instant contender in the best actor face, and Stone may be up for some contending himself.
You told the crowd at the premiere that “Elsinore” was hot off the presses. How recent was it?
We finished on Wednesday of last week, so it’s a week and a half old. It’s very fresh. I think we were very lucky. Focus happened to have a slot that was unoccupied in their fall slate. And I think of course they recognized what Andrew’s doing in the movie is kind of undeniable (for awards consideration), and also that it’s a film that really resonates with audiences. I think that when you’re dealing with studios who still believe in watching movies in the theater, a film like this is like catnip. It’s specially made as an advocate for the theater-going experience. And I think all that catapulted us into a schedule that meant that we had to go fast, because we had to get to here (Telluride). We’re releasing in November, and when we release the movie, it will have been about 10 months from when we shot it. That’s lightning.
I’m not sure of comparable stories about how quickly a film turns around, and that is a testament to the work of everyone who told that story, and how prepared Andrew was. I guess we were all. I’d directed “Hamlet” on stage; Andrew had played Hamlet on stage; I had directed at the National Theatre. We knew all of these environments and this community. When you live that life for a long time, you want to be true to it, so there was an insistence on veracity and honesty that held true.
We all probably could have guessed that Andrew had done “Hamlet” on stage.
He had to relearn all the soliloquies, and I dadidn’t know exactly what scenes what bits were from, so I had to remind myself. But I essentially directed that production of “Hamlet” live, and we shot a documentary of me directing it, essentially, but I had an avatar of Johnny Flynn pretending to be me. But nobody knew when they walked into that rehearsal room on those days how it was gonna be staged. I staged it live, the way you would in a rehearsal room. What you’re watching in all of those rehearsal sequences is Andrew genuinely improvising. I mean, he knew his lines, but the idea of how he does it and where he does it, how it… That thing where Johnny (as the director) goes, “Don’t be afraid of intimacy. Hold each other,” those are all lines that I, a minute before we rolled, had fed into Johnny’s ear. Because I direct plays all the time, so I was like, “Well, this is the easiest way of us shooting this — for me to just direct this play.”
What were the other actors in the “Hamlet” scenes told about the story or about what to do?
They knew the backstory because in London, Ian’s story is one of those myths that is really meaningful, and a lot of his friends were in the film. And it’s a love letter to what theater is — it’s right there. They all wanted to do that, and to make it genuine, as opposed to like… You see so many depictions of theater as this over-the-top, self-centered, performative thing, and I wanted to show it as a crucible, as a shelter, as a safe place.
There is a scene when Ian starts coming clean about his illness with the rest of the “Hamlet” cast, and a viewer might wonder if, in a scene like that, there will be one token person who seems uncomfortable after learning he has AIDS, but they appear uniformly supportive. It does show what theater buffs hope the inner theater community is really like.
That’s right. I also think the theater community is a group of outsiders. It’s a bunch of freaks and geeks, and the reason we got into it was to share a common humanity, despite not being an average human being. There are a lot of parallels with the gay community at that time, and there is a distinct overlap, obviously. There are a lot of gay kids that ended up in theater because it was a place to express things that they felt that they couldn’t express elsewhere. So I think it’s a kind of rallying cry for acceptance and truth. And when we screened it last night, so many people were so heartfelt in really trying to express how moved they were by having felt seen or having felt someone in their life was seen by this film. That’s worth a million reviews or a million articles. It’s just a single person saying “That meant so much to me,” and I think Ian would feel really happy that that’s his legacy.
You must know what you’ve got on your hands. Did you expect the kind of reaction you’ve gotten in Telluride?
I would never have the hubris to assume that my reaction to something is gonna be someone else’s reaction to something. But I do know that I’ve made it in the spirit of heartfelt positivity about the joy we can find in life in the face of adversity. I think we’re living in a time in history where things feel so insecure geopolitically, socially — so divisive, so much difference. We’re focused on difference all the time in the media or in politics, like what separates us. I knew that people would really appreciate a film which is about no matter how different we are, we have to be together, otherwise all is lost…. The final scene seems like a triumph of an individual, but it’s not. It’s a group of people saying, “You are one of us.” The final scene is a flashback, because by the time you see the final scene, he’s already passed. So what you know is that you’re being let into what might have been his last memory as he disappeared, and it’s a memory of being with a group of people who said “We love you.”
Where do you think we’re at now in terms of people doing stories about “the AIDS era”? In terms of major films, it’s receded a bit.
Well, like all of these things, I think they need to recede. You know, thank God people aren’t making so many World War II movies. Every second movie in the ’50s was about the Second World War, and it had to be, because it was the big reckoning. When I was growing up, most multiplexes had one Second World War film in it at any point. And if you chart the history of Hollywood, you realize that becomes less and less and less and less. And, and there, of course, is the danger because at the end of the day, it was an important kind of reckoning, and it was an important catharsis. Then, of course, people go, “Well, that can’t be the only thing we’re focusing on,” because at a certain point it becomes fetishistic. I do think that that’s the same thing with any cataclysmic event: It needs a real analysis, but then it also needs the catharsis, which is we’ve explored — what it was about us that we got wrong. In the AIDS epidemic, it was very much a marginalization of a group of people that we thought that that was their problem rather than ours. I hope that we have learnt the lesson from that.
I also think that it’s because unless you’re in certain parts of the Third World, you’re not dealing with the idea of fatality if you get an HIV diagnosis. So all of these things mean that it kind of becomes less immediately relevant or immediately urgent. But that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t represent all sorts of lessons that we can learn about ourselves now. And I think that what’s great about this film is that AIDS is a context in the film. It’s a situation. In the same way that Martin’s film (Martin McDonagh’s “Wild Horse Nine,” also showing in Telluride) is (set) in the ’70s…. The idea of American intervention in overseas political environments, that’s a context. But at the same time, (“Wild Horse Nine”) is a conversation about what happens when arrogant white men think that they can tell other people how to live, and that then suddenly feels relevant to now.
And I think that we found an equivalent thing with this. AIDS is a context, but it’s a conversation about divisiveness in communities, about the endless attempts to separate ourselves from each other and to create taboos in minority communities about what’s acceptable and what’s not acceptable. And I think that this film is is about: stop looking for everything that’s different about you and find something that’s similar. Find the common ground. Ian did that so beautifully in his life.
So I think it’s a very long-winded answer to your question about the relevance of the AIDS movie. But I think that the great triumph is that when “Philadelphia” was made, it had to be the only topic of that film, and we’ve got to a point where it’s one of five strands. And that’s an achievement. That’s a triumph.
Dealing with a terminal illness is closer to universal than not. People die unexpectedly, of course, too, but for the most part…
Yeah facing the end of life is a pretty common thing. The beauty of what he does in the movie is that he looks into the abyss and he finds hope. And weirdly, I was talking to some people where it was like, “Last night I was crying my eyes out, but today I feel really good.” I was like, that’s a common response to people who watch the film, because it’s true catharsis. It’s like a good session with your therapist. It’s like, yeah, it was painful to witness for a second, but at the end of the day, what it gave you was hope, and that’s a great thing to have. Because he faced the end willingly and with beauty, and that grace is extraordinary.
You said it was Andrew’s performance that put Focus into a hurry in wanting to get this out at a premium time this fall. What does his work on this mean to you, as his director?
Well, I mean, Andrew is one of those actors that I think we took for granted for a long time, thinking that he’ll always turn up and he’ll always be amazing. And I think this is one of the first projects where we had to be as amazing as he was — that he wasn’t just in the service of what we were doing. I think we as an industry have done that a lot. We’ve hired him to be in the service of what we need to do, and he’s always turned up, he’s delivered, he’s been brilliant. But this is the first one that’s been really 100% about what can we do to be in the service of you, Andrew, and he deserves the movie in the same way that Ian deserves this portrait of him. And I feel so honored to have kind of been a priest of that temple.
