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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.”

“The movie for me is about time,” says Andrew Scott. “What are you going to do with your time? Ian decided to to live and to be a light and to be around people for the glory of the theater.”

(Anthony Dickenson / Focus Features)

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 missionary Eric Liddell in “Chariots of Fire.” He died eight weeks after leaving the National Theatre stage. “Elsinore” captures that journey in all of its glories and taxing challenges.

“That he would go for treatment in the morning and then play this Olympian role is just endlessly moving,” Scott says. “I don’t know how he did it.”

With our pint glasses filled with water as we adjust to Telluride’s altitude, we try to figure it out.

Charleson playing Hamlet, scaling the Everest for actors, reminded me of David Bowie making “Blackstar” as he was dying. As an artist, you’re not often given the chance to shape the narrative of your own end.

Being offered Hamlet doesn’t happen to every actor. To take it and turn it into something generous and useful — useful is a word I love about acting, that it’s useful to people.

When people are feeling down, they can watch a movie they love.

And see themselves. That can’t be underestimated.

What’s your go-to movie?

I will always watch “Bridesmaids” when it comes on TV. Comedy is precious to me. Laughing is precious to me. I don’t see it as the antithesis of tragedy. I think they’re one and the same.

The last time we talked, around the time of “Ripley,” you wanted to put out into the universe the idea of starring in a musical or a comedy. That hasn’t happened by the strictest definition. But you seem to be saying that genre labels don’t matter.

The reason, hopefully, that “Elsinore” is moving is that we approach some of the stuff with quite a bit of lightness. The effect is tragic and there are some heavy things in it. But my job, what I prioritized, is keeping it light.

You are seen dancing to Ethel Merman’s disco album. It doesn’t get much lighter than that.

My favorite actors are the ones that are funny. I worked with Lisa Kudrow last year on “The Comeback,” and yes, of course, she’s very funny. But if you look at that performance she gives toward the end, it’s so moving. People come away from things that are labeled comedies and go, “I just laughed at that.” Or people come away from things that maybe were really sad and say, “I was just devastated by that.” I think the job is to get rid of categorizing and make it more fluid.

Like life. Sometimes you eat the bear and sometimes, the bear, he eats you.

Exactly! I don’t love things that are overly serious. One of my big dreams for this film — and I do wish so much for this film because it’s so personal — is that people don’t feel like that they’re going to see something that’s depressing. I didn’t want to fetishize Ian’s death.

What do you hope audiences take away from watching it?

That they see themselves in it. You know, it doesn’t end well for any of us. The movie for me is about time. What are you going to do with your time? Ian decided to to live and to be a light and to be around people for the glory of the theater.

Speaking of time, next month you’re going to be celebrating a milestone, turning 50. Or not celebrating. I don’t know how you feel about birthdays.

I don’t love my birthday.

Any year?

My friends have said to me, “You gotta make some plans.” I love a party. Which is to say, I love other people’s parties. What I usually do is I leave it to the last minute and send texts around, saying, “I understand if you don’t want to come, but I might do this.” And then you do something small. I read something yesterday where you should go to your own parties like you’re a guest. I think that’s a very good way to to do it.

What about just being around for half a century? Is that in your head? You’re the one who just said it doesn’t end well for any of us.

I’ve definitely thought about it more. Sometimes in the middle of the night, I’ve thought, “Jesus, what?” I’m sure that’s because of my mom dying and that I’m approaching my mortality. Again, how am I going to use my time? One of the reasons I was so ferocious about getting “Elsinore” made was that I would put all of myself into this and then maybe I can chill out a bit more.

Andrew Scott in the movie “Elsinore.”

(Anthony Dickenson / Focus Features)

The personal aspects of this movie are striking. In addition to producing “Elsinore,” you yourself have played Hamlet on stage. You’re also a gay actor portraying someone who, at the time, would have torpedoed his career by coming out.

When I was a kid, I was obsessed with the movies and would read Premiere and Empire magazine. Around 16 or 17, I started to realize that maybe if you’re gay, you wouldn’t be invited to movies. And I wasn’t wrong in thinking that, because there weren’t many examples. So I would omit things in interviews. I wouldn’t lie, but I really understood that about Ian’s generation.

There’s a melancholy moment in the movie where he says, “I wanted to be in the movies. I didn’t scale the heights.”

What a gorgeous little dream. A young boy goes, “I want to be in the movies.” And then to have that knocked out of you bit by bit. You’re not even going to be seen for the audition. Or, “Are you being a little fruity there?”

Did people tell you not to talk about being gay?

Very well-meaning people said to me, “Just keep that [private] because you’re not obviously gay,” which I often think is such an insult to say to people. “So maybe you can get away with it.” And I was like, OK. And I did that for awhile. But it was so insidious. When audiences think of acting, they think of actors pretending, like you’re putting yourself in somebody else’s shoes. So the fact that there was this whole section of gay actors who weren’t allowed to do that is awful. I’m so grateful that I get to do that.

What do you remember about the late ’80s and early ’90s in terms of navigating the AIDS epidemic?

It makes me emotional. It was extraordinary just to to have lived through that time and to be completely abandoned by your government, who wouldn’t even say the name of the illness. When I was a young adult, that’s what I was scared of. If you go for a sexual health screening, you go, “My God, am I going to die?” I remember going into those situations, and with no cause for such concern, feeling like I’m going to be punished for expressing myself in that way, because that’s the way the world was set up.

Let’s get back to Ethel Merman.

Please! [Laughs]

There’s that stanza in “There’s No Business Like Show Business” that goes: “There’s no people like show people / They smile when they are low.” Would you say that sums up the spirit of “Elsinore” about as well as any couplet could?

Yes, it’s so much about the power of community and show people. It’s about show people and smiling and getting on with the show.

When did you first feel that power of community?

Putting on “The Wizard of Oz” in a school play when I was about 10.

What part did you play?

Guess.

Dorothy?

[Laughs] No, a friend of Dorothy. Oh, come on. One more guess.

The Cowardly Lion?

No. The Tin Man. My mom sprayed me silver, in my hair and everything. We had a probably bit of aluminum foil and I had a funnel. I loved it so much. And I remember having a really extraordinary feeling of surprise, knowing the audience was there. For such a shy boy, when I had to do the big number, “If I Only Had a Heart,” it went to another level, better than rehearsal. I suppose the little showman, the little 10-year-old silver showman, came out.

The group exhibition “To Share a Stomach” is a bit like the children’s game Telephone, in which a phrase, whispered from person to person, inevitably comes out a bit garbled. Urgently conceived by curator Aram Moshayedi in March, on the heels of the latest U.S.-Israeli attacks on Iran, it features works envisioned by 25 Iranian artists that were fabricated with varying degrees of collaboration by 24 counterparts here in the U.S.

Hampered by significant internet blackouts, displacements and the loss of studios and artwork in Iran, as well as an extremely compressed timeline (just five months), the results are understandably rangy and uneven. Yet the show, now on view at the Brick through Sept. 19, is an achingly beautiful meditation on the difficulty of communication and the shared goodwill that intermittently, imperfectly, surmounts it.

Sina Ghadaksaz and John Ziqiang Wu, “What the Clouds Remember and the Mountains Forget,” 2026; Carmen Argote, “Aram’s sneakers: Mount Eynali,” August 6, 8–1030p.m., 2026; Mohammadreza Jahanshir, “Glory / 50904020,” 2026; Maryam Lashkari, Hodjat Salimi, and Oscar Tuazon, “Can You S…?,” 2026; Kelly Akashi and Mimi Amini with David Gutierrez, Matt Rademacher and Kazuki Takizawa, “The Anatomy of a Postponed Intent: The Glass Blade,” 2026; Fatemeh Kazemi and Olivia Mole, “The Conference of the Birds,” 2026, can be seen in the exhibition “To Share a Stomach,” at the Brick in Los Angeles.

(Ruben Diaz 2026)

None of the works address the recent bombardments directly, although the precarious context of ongoing threat, instability and struggle can be felt in almost all of them. Ducking into Maryam Lashkari, Hodjat Salimi and Oscar Tuazon’s interactive sculpture — an enormous cardboard tube lying on its side — feels like entering a culvert or a bomb shelter. Inside, one lies on a crude bed of felt blankets and dons a set of headphones; the sounds of jet planes, a party, conversations and emergency sirens are interspersed with an imperious voice reading a guided meditation on how to be present in one’s body during a bombing. The harsh realities of war are woven into the textures of everyday life, warping and fraying into something absurd. Viewers may scan a QR code for their own copy of the audio track, which deteriorates in sound quality with every download.

Slow disintegration also appears in a triptych of videos by Ismail Ghanbari (facilitated by Tala Madani but not credited as a collaboration). In the largest central one, we see Ghanbari holding two nearly destroyed boxing gloves as he explains how he trained so intensely for a performance in which he boxed for five hours that the gloves began to fall apart. Their tattered remnants, barely held together with patches and stitching, are poignant metaphors for a battered will that keeps fighting even as protections wear thin.

Vulnerability and violence also co-exist in Mimi Amini and Kelly Akashi’s collaboration: a sword made of clear glass. Hanging from the rafters, the tip of its blade points down ominously over viewers’ heads, emphasizing both the danger of the weapon and its fragility. If it fell, would it pierce one’s skull or shatter into bits? It exists suspended between latent violence and the risk of its own annihilation.

Fatemeh Kazemi and Olivia Mole, “The Conference of the Birds,” 2026; Fatemeh Kazemi, “What the Birds Did Not Tell Upon Their Return,” 2026, in the exhibit, “To Share a Stomach,” at the Brick in Los Angeles.

(Ruben Diaz 2026)

These impressions are responses to the works as they exist in the gallery, but the show has another layer, revealed in an accompanying booklet that reproduces the initial emails or texts from the Iranian artists to the curator. Interwoven with stories of life during wartime are proposals or instructions, allowing viewers to assess for themselves how much the works in the gallery reflect the artists’ original ideas. For example, the tube-bunker was initially envisioned as a “completely dark space” twinkling with a variety of malfunctioning countdown clocks. Ghanbari’s video appears in lieu of the gloves themselves, and Amini’s original digital rendering of the glass sword is much more detailed and intricate than the comparatively “low-res” version on view.

If we think of an artwork as an intentional, carefully wrought creation that comes directly from an artist, what are we to make of these incomplete, unfaithful interpretations? I was reminded of the reality TV show “Nailed It!,” in which amateur bakers fail spectacularly to reproduce complex cakes. I cackle at the distance between perfection and utter collapse, but I also feel a pang of tenderness: I am moved by their effort.

Artists, of course, are no strangers to things not going to plan. While the exhibit is enabled by the entwined ubiquity of the English language and the internet, the artists know these technologies aren’t transparent. Most of the Iranian artists left their instructions generously open-ended, inviting the interpretations and transmutations of their U.S. peers. In some cases, it seems the partners did not continue the conversation; whether due to disagreement, bombardment or government-imposed internet blackouts (described to chilling effect in an essay by Negar Karimkhani) is unclear. The U.S. artists were constrained by a very compressed timeline (and presumably budget and space) to fabricate and display the works. Even without these limitations, to hand over one’s vision to someone else, and conversely, to shoulder the responsibility for realizing it are both touching acts of trust.

Ali Ansari and Renée Petropoulos, “Between Entries”, 2026; Salman Khoshroo and Daid Roy, “Defensive Wall,” 2026; Ismail Ghanbari, “Proxy (Neyabati) 1,” “Proxy (Neyabati) 2,” “Proxy (Neyabati) 3,” 2026, on view as part of the exhibition, “To Share a Stomach,” at the Brick in Los Angeles.

(Ruben Diaz 2026)

Viewers must exert themselves a little too. Understanding who is responsible for what work and to what degree requires consulting a floor plan, a checklist and the booklet: an awkward juggling act that would have been eased by some wall labels. Still, as I shuffled papers, I became part of the buffering, incomplete chain of communication. As Amini wrote of the glass blade, “the perfection of this form is preserved only with the mental space shared between the conceptualizing artist and the interpreting artist.” I venture to add the viewer to that space, thinking of Yoko Ono’s instruction artworks (across town at the Broad) which short-circuit any physical acts of making to take shape only in our minds.

This kind of intimacy — thinking, envisioning, constructing together — is rare when it comes to American intersections with Iran. I was previously unfamiliar with the Iranian artists in the show, and I’m sure I missed many cultural and linguistic references in their works. My focus on pieces evoking violence predictably reflects my limited knowledge of Iran as other than a locus of U.S. antagonism (the result of a different information blackout).

Yet, “To Share a Stomach” lays down — gingerly, gently — an alternate connective thread, spun from a mutual recognition of fallibility. In his introductory essay, curator Moshayedi reveals that the show’s title is his mistranslation of the Farsi word for “empathy.” (The correct translation is “to share a heart.”) He goes on to confess that after many years’ study, he finally gave up on learning the language. We will never understand each other perfectly; I am still moved by the effort.