Andrew Scott interview: ‘Ripley’

“I suppose you just have to make a decision pretty early on that the biography of the character … isn’t ever going to be reliable,” explains Andrew Scott about playing the duplicitous title character in the Netflix limited series “Ripley.” To portray someone whose true nature is hidden beneath layers of deception, the actor worked to “establish a kind of emotional backstory for him and to decide what things that I perhaps think he might be lying about and really try to focus on the things that he really believes.” Watch our exclusive video interview with Scott above.

When we meet Tom Ripley, he’s a petty con artist living in 1960s New York City. He’s approached by Herbert Greenleaf (Kenneth Lonergan), whose son Dickie (Johnny Flynn) is living the high life in Italy. Herbert wants him to return home and hopes that Tom will be able to convince him. But Tom proves to be a dangerous addition to Dickie’s life of luxury. During his cons, Tom has to “shapeshift” to become who or what he needs to be in each given moment, “but actually the reason that the character is so enduring and fascinating for so many people, not just actors, is I think because we’re all a little bit like that. We all adapt ourselves slightly.”

So Scott didn’t want to stand in judgment of Tom. “The idea of him being a psychopath, or being all those words that people use, I didn’t find helpful,” he says. His focus instead was on the “very human nature of Tom and what it’s like to discover new things, and his sort of enthusiasm for life or his loneliness, so there were huge amounts of the character that I really did relate to.”

There were also significant physical challenges in playing Tom. “I’m still exhausted” from the scene in episode three where (SPOILER ALERT) Tom is backed into a corner and impulsively murders Dickie on a boat. “There was a huge amount of drowning and trying to get back up onto a boat 30 times in a row.” There was also “a lot of rock lifting.” Additionally, “trying to lift a dead body is incredibly difficult when you don’t know how to do that.” And stairways are a recurring motif in the series, which introduced plenty of climbing and descending. “If you go to Italy, that’s part of your experience,” Scott points out. “[Writer-director Steven Zaillian] likes to get a lot of coverage, so I was up and down those stairs a lot. So I had buns of steel.”