Andrew Scott knows a little about ghosts. His 'Elsinore' just swept into the Oscar race

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Set us as preferred TELLURIDE, Colo. — Do you believe in ghosts?Andrew Scott considers the question and looks at me with a mischievous grin, retreating to a corner of the restaurant booth where we’re catching up a few hours before his new movie, “Elsinore,” the most personal film he has ever made, premieres at the Telluride Film Festival.Scott turns over the question again.

“Do I believe in ghosts?”It feels like a reasonable thing to ask.Three years ago at Telluride, the yearning romantic fantasy “All of Us Strangers” memorably premiered, featuring Scott playing a character who worked through unresolved trauma by talking to the dead.

Ghosts are elsewhere in his work, metaphorical (“Vanya”) and literal (“Hamlet”).“If I had a gun put to my head — which you don’t have to — I would say that I don’t believe in them,” Scott says.

“But the idea of the afterlife and where we will go is still really fascinating to me.Dreams and the subconscious, too.

I don’t know what went on consciously in the world outside my hotel room here last night.I was perfectly content to be asleep.

And I like the idea of thinking about death that way.I’ll just be asleep.

It’ll be OK.It’s the undiscovered country.” Movies The Colorado festival’s 53rd edition will feature tributes to John Malkovich and Sandra Hüller, a strong documentary slate and a secret world premiere.Dropping a line from Hamlet’s “to be or not to be” soliloquy in this context feels unavoidable.

In the powerfully moving “Elsinore,” Scott plays the real-life actor Ian Charleson, who, as he was secretly dying from AIDS, played Hamlet in a 1989 Royal National Theatre production, still considered one of the great performances in London theater history.Charleson was 40 at the time, known for playing Scottish Olympic athlete and...