NEW YORK — Andrew Scott, the 47-year-old Irish actor, is in demand like never before. That’s partly due to accrued good will. A regular presence on stage in the West End, Scott is known to many as the “Hot Priest” of “Fleabag” or the cunning Moriarty of “Sherlock.” Soon, he’ll play Tom Ripley in the Netflix series “Ripley,” adapted from the Patricia Highsmith novel.
But the real reason Scott’s time is short right now is Andrew Haigh’s new film, “All of Us Strangers.” In it, Scott plays a screenwriter working on a script about his childhood. The film is gently poised in a metaphysical realm; when Adam (Scott) returns to his childhood home, he finds his parents (Claire Foy, Jamie Bell) as they were before they died many years earlier.
At the same time, the movie, loosely adapted from Taichi Yamada’s 1987 book “Strangers,” balances a budding romance with a neighbor (Paul Mescal), a relationship that unfolds with profound reverberations of family, intimacy and queer life. In a dreamy, longing ghost story, Scott is its aching, shimmering soul.
“The challenge of it was to try to go to that place but not gild the lily too much,” Scott says. “As an actor, I have to be in touch with that playful side of myself and that part of you that’s childish. I was actually quite struck by how vulnerable I looked in the film.”
Scott’s acutely tender performance has made him a contender for the Academy Awards. He was named best actor by the National Society of Film Critics. At the Golden Globes on Sunday (Scott wore a white tux and t-shirt), he was nominated for best actor in a drama.
He’s been acting since he was young; drama classes were initially a way to get over shyness. Haigh, the British filmmaker of “45 Years” and “Weekend,” began thinking of Scott for the role early on. They met and talked through the script for a few hours.
“He’s a similar generation to me. He’s a tiny bit younger than me, but he’s from the same generation,” says Haigh. “He understands that experience.”
Scott came out publicly in 2013, but his natural inclination is to be private. “I feel like I’ve given so much of myself in the film, you think you don’t want to give it all away,” he says. He describes “All of Us Strangers” — which Haigh shot partly in his childhood home — as personal, but not autobiographical in its depiction of the alienation that can linger after coming out.
“Mercifully, I feel very comfortable for the most part. But it stays with you that pain, and it actually makes you more compassionate, I think,” says Scott.
The tenderness in the film is also owed in part to Scott’s chemistry with Mescal. On-screen chemistry is an amorphous quality that the film industry has long tried to turn into a science with camera tests and marketing that flirts with real-life romance.
But for Scott, it’s something different. “Chemistry isn’t just about sexual chemistry. It’s something to do with listening, and I think it’s something to do with playfulness,” Scott says. “Your ability to listen to someone and take note of what someone is doing is chemistry. You have to wait and see what the other actor is doing.”