Andrew Scott reacts to Paul Mescal’s Hot Priest Halloween costume

25 January, 2024

Andrew Scott

Actors Paul Mescal and Andrew Scott co-star in acclaimed new film All Of Us Strangers, released in cinemas this week, and recently uncovered some details about their friendship during an exclusive interview with NME.

Scott, best-known to fans of BBC sitcom Fleabag as the ‘Hot Priest’, revealed his reaction to Mescal dressing up as the character for Halloween in 2022. The image, which also features Mescal’s Normal People co-star Daisy Edgar-Jones in costume as Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s titular ‘Fleabag’, went viral and has since become a frequently referenced moment in Mescal’s career. You can watch the pair discussing it in the above video.

Mescal and Scott first met in 2020 when they appeared in a RTE charity sketch together, so when he and Edgar-Jones decided on their outfits two years later, he says Scott was the “first person I sent the picture to obviously” and that it would have been “creepy” if they’d never talked about it prior to shooting All Of Us Strangers.

Scott suggested that, next time, Mescal shouldn’t dress up as one of his characters, but as himself, Andrew Scott the actor – and asked what he would wear. “A lovely little knit,” joked Mescal in reply.

When asked which of Mescal’s characters Scott would choose to dress up as for Halloween, he picked his co-star’s upcoming Gladiator sequel, directed by Ridley Scott – and revealed that he’d seen some photos from the set already.

Elsewhere in the interview, the actors discussed the supernatural themes which run through All Of Us Strangers, itself adapted from a 1987 Japanese ghost story by Yamada Taichi. Mescal chose to tell a story from his childhood in Ireland.

“There’s a hotel in Sligo, I can’t remember, I think it’s called [The Clayton],” he said. “Me and my brother were 12, Donnacha was 10. We were in this hotel. The door was propped up and we heard this whistling, I swear to god, we heard this whistling and we were watching The Spongebob Movie. We stopped for a second and the whistling got really loud and then the chair that was propping the door open flew into the bedroom [and the door] slammed shut. Me and Donnacha were screaming at the top of our lungs. My mum was in the next room, she couldn’t hear us.

“We wake up the next morning and we find out that the hotel was an old mental asylum where lots of dark stuff happened. I don’t necessarily believe in ghosts but what happened in that room was weird and kind of unexplainable.”

‘All Of Us Strangers’ is released in cinemas from January 26

The post Andrew Scott reacts to Paul Mescal’s Hot Priest Halloween costume appeared first on NME.