Andrew Scott Gives a Career-Best Performance in Elsinore — New UK Trailer

The new UK trailer opens on a detail that tells you everything about this film: Andrew Scott’s hand, cradling a skull, turning it slowly in the light. It is the most famous prop in theatre history — Yorick’s skull — and in Simon Stone’s Elsinore it carries a second meaning, because the man holding it was dying while he rehearsed with it.

LOS ANGELES — If awards season has a heartbeat this year, it is pounding in the trailer for Elsinore. Directed by actor-turned-filmmaker Simon Stone (The Dig) and written by Stephen Beresford (Pride), the film dramatizes the final months of Ian Charleson — a gifted Scottish actor known on screen for playing Olympic runner Eric Liddell in Chariots of Fire — who delivered what became a legendary performance of Hamlet at London’s National Theatre while dying of AIDS.

The circumstances are the stuff of theatrical legend. When Daniel Day-Lewis abruptly walked away from the National Theatre’s Hamlet in 1989, the production needed a replacement fast. Charleson, already seriously ill, stepped in. He played the run — and died at 40 in January 1990, only weeks after the final curtain. The film centers on that last stretch of his life: an actor confronting his own mortality while preparing for the performance that would ultimately define his stage career.

The response out of the fall festivals has been rapturous. Elsinore premiered at the 2026 Telluride Film Festival before screening at the Toronto International Film Festival, where programmers wrote that Scott delivers “a career-best performance” — adding that the film wondrously celebrates both Charleson and Hamlet, and that through Scott, each real and fictional man’s confrontation with death becomes visceral and profoundly moving. The Playlist’s Gregory Ellwood, reviewing the film at Telluride, called it “the role of a lifetime” for Scott, and singled out Olivia Colman and Billie Piper alongside the way Stone and editor Valerio Bonelli build Charleson’s declining health and intense rehearsal process toward those final performances.

Stone is best known as an actor who became one of the most sought-after theatre and film directors of his generation — his earlier features include The Daughter and the Netflix period drama The Dig. For Elsinore, he assembled an ensemble that reads like a roll call of contemporary British acting: Olivia Colman plays Charleson’s doctor, Johnny Flynn plays National Theatre director Richard Eyre, and the cast also includes Billie Piper, Joe Locke, Peter Mullan, Charles Edwards, and Juliet Stevenson, with Luke Thompson, David Dawson, Monica Dolan, Adeel Akhtar, Matthew Beard, and Kadiff Kirwan in support. The film is produced by Studiocanal, LD Entertainment, Lucky Red, and Magnolia Mae Films.

Awards watchers have already slotted Scott into the conversation. His recent run — the romantic drama All of Us Strangers, the Emmy-nominated Ripley miniseries, and the 2025 Knives Out sequel Wake Up Dead Man — has made him one of the most in-demand screen actors of his generation, and Elsinore, on which he also serves as a producer, is his biggest leading-film vehicle yet. The screenplay is written by Stephen Beresford from an idea by Ethan Silverman, with Mike Eley behind the camera, Valerio Bonelli editing, and Stefan Gregory composing the score — a full prestige assembly aimed squarely at the season.

What makes the new UK trailer hit differently is how deliberately Stone’s film stages the collision between the play and the man. Charleson’s dilemma is Shakespeare’s dilemma, literalized: “to be, or not to be” is no longer a soliloquy but a medical fact, a rehearsal schedule, a body failing in real time while the show, famously, goes on. In a fall season already crowded with prestige contenders, that is the kind of high-wire premise that either collapses under its own weight or becomes the thing everyone is still talking about in February.

The rollout is a classic awards-season play. Focus Features will open Elsinore in select U.S. theaters on November 20, expanding over Thanksgiving and through December; Studiocanal, which financed and made the film, will release it in UK cinemas on January 29, 2027. Between now and then, the film continues a fall festival run through London, Mill Valley, Montclair, and Chicago — each stop another chance for the Scott buzz to build from festival whisper to campaign roar.

The film also arrives at a moment when British queer history is being reclaimed on screen with unusual care. Charleson’s story is not just about a great performance under impossible conditions; it is about an era — the late-1980s height of the AIDS crisis — when actors like Charleson, and figures like filmmaker Derek Jarman (reportedly portrayed by David Dawson), were creating art while a plague was treated as a moral verdict. That context is what lifts Elsinore above a standard biopic: it is a portrait of a community and a profession under siege, told through one man’s refusal to leave the stage. For more of this fall’s awards-season picture, see our box office finals coverage and the Ben Affleck Netflix feature heading to screens October 9.

The UK trailer is out now. The skull is waiting.