Ripley star Andrew Scott is a gay actor — no “openly” necessary.
In a new interview with Variety this week, Scott (or as Fleabag fans will forever know him, Hot Priest) reflected on his robust career playing unhinged, dangerous, and frequently queer characters. But while Scott acknowledged that his work holds a lot of meaning amid shifting cultural perceptions of LGBTQ+ people, he also pushed back on a phrase frequently used to summarize his sexual identity: “openly gay.”
“It’s wonderful to be able to talk about sexuality in an open way, other people — and by other people, I mean straight people — don’t have to explain or talk about their sexuality every time they go to work,” he said.
The phrase “openly gay” has become much more frequently used in the past decade, usually in media reports (including some here on Them) to denote a person who has publicly stated that they fall under the LGBTQ+ umbrella. “Openly gay” is frequently used synonymously with “out gay,” the phrasing Variety used when describing Scott. Some celebrities have embraced the lingo, like Ncuti Gatwa (who has said he was never “in the closet”) and Ariana DeBose. But as Scott argued, even though the general ability to disclose one’s queerness is a mark of progress, “out” and “openly” don’t necessarily carry equal weight.
“The idea that I’m being defiant by just being exactly who I am … Be open about it? Why wouldn’t you be open about it?” the Irish actor asked. “[T]he word ‘openly,’ for me, just seems a little loaded.”
Later in the interview, Scott also pushed back against what he called “an identity-politics era,” which he said isolates LGBTQ+ people from one another and the rest of society. “We’re separating each other more than we need to,” he opined. “This hysteria about your sexuality and how that is something that is only understandable to people who belong to the same tribe as you — it just doesn’t seem truthful.”
Scott also spoke candidly to Variety about the recent death of his mother, Nora, after a sudden illness, crediting her with teaching him “the idea of being authentically yourself.” But he also made time for lightness and frivolity in the conversation, explaining how Taylor Swift’s latest album The Tortured Poets Department may have drawn its name from one of his less-than-successful group chats. In 2022, Scott created a text thread with former co-stars Paul Mescal (All of Us Strangers) and Joe Alwyn (Catherine Called Birdy), prior to the latter’s breakup with Swift, and titled it “Tortured Man Club,” in reference to their shared attraction toward playing brooding male characters.
“It wasn’t about our own characteristics!” stressed Scott, who called Swift “a force of nature” and a friend. “I think there were three texts, like, ‘Hey, guys.’ You know those groups that you set up, and they just collapse.”
Ripley, in which Scott plays eponymous con man Tom Ripley of Patricia Highsmith’s classic crime series, is streaming now on Netflix. We hear Tom still thinks he likes girls.
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