Andrew Scott Was Born to Play Tom Ripley

Midway through Netflix’s new series Ripley, Tom Ripley walks through the lobby of the Excelsior hotel in Rome as if it's his second home. The tails of his overcoat follow in the breeze of his confident stride, his hand fiddles with the familiar brim of his hat. On his face, the sly smile of a man who cuts through a room as if he owns it and the Italian vocabulary of someone who has spoken it his entire life.

It’s the demeanor of someone who knows their elevated perch in the world — and he wears it impeccably well. It just isn’t his. This Tom Ripley is, of course, the literary world’s most infamous grifter from Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley. And for his latest celluloid incarnation, Tom Ripley is played by an exceptional Andrew Scott, wrestling one of pop culture’s toughest-to-crack characters into submission.

In creator, writer, and director Steven Zaillian’s monochromatic reimagining (originally produced for Showtime before landing at Netflix), Ripley follows a familiar path set in Highsmith’s original 1955 novel. Hired by a wealthy shipping magnate to track down his playboy son Dickie Greenleaf (Johnny Flynn) in Italy, Ripley abandons his habit for small-potatoes confidence schemes and becomes entranced by the lavish life of his target. When things turn deadly, Ripley goes all in on his biggest con yet, seizing the life he’s always wanted by any means necessary. In that lobby, Tom Ripley doesn’t exist — only the carefully curated copy of Dickie Greenleaf.

The story already played out on screen with a baby-faced Matt Damon in Anthony Minghella’s 1999 film The Talented Mr. Ripley (and before that, with Alain Delon in 1960’s Purple Noon), but Scott’s take on the character is much more insatiable. In his hands, Ripley isn’t just a lovesick opportunist seduced by the pretty face and life of his faux friend in Dickie. Here, he’s older, colder, more bound by his impulses and insecurities, and even more instantaneously hungry to covet Dickie’s world.

While the overuse of this phrase often diminishes its power, it’s not an exaggeration to say that Scott was born to play this role because the enigmatic persona that Ripley harnesses like a sixth sense is exactly how Scott has built his impressive TV career. The man who blazes a path through the lobby of that hotel in Episode 4 isn’t the same man who slinks onto the stoop of a doctor’s office in Episode 1 to snag a few checks he can forge. There is a knowing shift in Ripley and Scott in just a matter of episodes, defying simple characterization and expectations. It is what Scott has been doing for years on television.

Many audiences knew him first as the playfully cunning and intellectually unhinged Professor Moriarty in the BBC’s Sherlock. As the greatest adversary of a modernized version of Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective (played by Benedict Cumberbatch), Scott built a fanbase on being the wild card in the system. The conundrum that could either solve the world’s problems or poke at them for the hell of it. If you have not witnessed his life-changing line delivery of “Honey, you should see me in a crown,” do yourself a favor and rectify that now. Scott’s Moriarty seduces and scares in equal measure, a terrifying cocktail of a character that earned Scott acolytes eager to see what else he could do.

But for his next hallmark TV role, Scott pivoted in a way that no one saw coming by donning a priest’s collar in the second season of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag. Simply known as Hot Priest, Scott made the world’s most unattainable single man seem just within reach for Waller-Bridge’s similarly unnamed character (known only as Fleabag). While far more interior than Moriarty, he methodically plays with the audience’s own sexual appetite for what they can’t have right up to the point that Fleabag confesses her own confounding love for a man of the cloth.

Entangling his fingers in hers just for a moment, Scott lets those three little words linger in the air long enough to make his response — “It’ll pass” — land like an empathetic but undeniable gut punch of reality. It is a brilliantly measured performance that rings in your ears as you watch Scott scheme his way through stylized murder and deception in Ripley. Hot Priest’s ability to see a situation at 10,000 feet and speak to the heart of it is exactly the kind of instincts that keep Ripley’s con believable for the unsuspecting marks along the way. And even the volatile nature of Moriarty is woven into the simmering sense that Ripley could snap at any moment.

Really, all of Scott’s TV roles — including other stints in The Hollow Crown, His Dark Materials, and Black Mirror: Smithereens — feel in conversation with the amalgamation that is Tom Ripley. By his very nature, Ripley is a constructed identity of the little pieces of himself that he’s given away to make room for those he pick-pockets from others. He adapts to any given environment, an instinctive defensive mechanism for a man who relies on the world to tell him who to be. Scott has proven he can be anyone he wants, and Ripley needs that kind of versatility to evade the suspicions of those concerned by his sudden immersion in Dickie's world. Ripley has to be both the threat you beg other characters to pay attention to, and the charmer who makes you question if maybe you are the one overreacting.

In Scott’s hands, there’s a pleasure in watching Ripley sink into the success of this deception, like witnessing a master at work in his field. Only when there are cracks to the façade does your mind rescue you from Scott’s clutches with a reminder that this character killed the object of his desire out of some misguided mixture of love, envy, and rage. Some of the greatest characters we have — and constantly revisit — are those that are capable of existing in that space between morality and malice, reminding us just how easy it can be to slip under the influence of the latter. Scott has been fine tuning his understanding of that duality of man his entire career, with roles like Moriarty and Hot Priest.

But the final piece arrived mere months ago with Scott’s role in Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers, in which he gives one of the most heart-wrenching and undeniably good-hearted performances in years. Stripped of any menace or tantalizing tension, his role as a fortysomething gay man quietly reliving the missed connections and truths of his past and present is bathed in a warmth and humanity that is essential to Tom Ripley.

After all, the only reason Ripley’s scheming works is because some part of him is sympathetic enough to keep most people’s suspicions at bay. He can walk through the lobbies of the world with his head held high and his charm laid on thick because at the end of the day, there’s a lost boy behind his eyes that pulls people in and quells further questioning. Scott is all these things at once — the saint, the sinner, and the enigma. So yes, he was born to play Tom Ripley. And just imagine what he might be capable of next, now that he’s added Highsmith’s creation to his arsenal.

Hunter Ingram is a TV writer living in North Carolina and watching way too much television. His byline has appeared in Variety, Emmy Magazine, USA Today, and across Gannett's USA Today Network newspapers.