(Credits: Far Out / Raph_PH)
Sun 14 December 2025 15:15, UK
From his early days on Sherlock to his recent stint playing Tom Ripley to his unforgettable turn as the sexy priest from Fleabag, Andrew Scott is a modern-day lord of television.
Off the screen, he’s an incredibly talented theatre actor as well. He won an Olivier award in 2020 for his role in Present Laughter and recently appeared in a production of Vanya in which he played every single goddamn character himself. The one medium you don’t associate Scott with is film, but his CV isn’t exactly lacking in that department.
When he was very young, Scott appeared as an extra in Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, where he could have wrangled a bigger part in the film, but was denied by a higher power. Other prominent performances have come in Sam Mendes’ 1917, Rian Johnson’s Wake Up Dead Man, and the James Bond movie Spectre. There’s also 2024’s All of Us Strangers, in which he gave one of the best performances of the year.
Turns out Scott knows more about film than we first gave him credit for. He might have been in plenty of great movies, but what does he like to watch in his rare downtime? Speaking with Red, the star was about his favourite film, a question he was only too happy to answer.
“Punch Drunk Love, which is a Paul Thomas Anderson film starring Adam Sandler and Emily Watson,” he said. “It’s a really underrated, brilliant film. It’s very romantic but in quite a fucked-up way, and I love that. I love the films of Paul Thomas Anderson.”
Punch-Drunk Love (I’m restoring the hyphen that Red so callously discarded) is one of the many grand contributions to cinema made by the man they called PTA. It follows a novelty item salesman who has been conditioned by his overbearing sisters that he’ll never find love. That all changes when he meets Lena (Emily Watson), a woman who changes his life. It sounds like a pretty basic concept, but it’s one of the most beloved movies of the 21st century, which goes against Scott’s claim that it’s “underrated”. It has legions of famous fans, with everyone from Francis Ford Coppola to Timothée Chalamet singing its praises.
The film is also famous for another reason. Even if you’ve never seen Punch-Drunk Love, then you probably still know it as “that movie in which Adam Sandler is actually good that isn’t Uncut Gems”. He plays Barry Egan, the main character, and it’s like watching a totally different person. Gone are the manchildish antics, gone are the toilet jokes and cheap laughs. He’s an actual person who, god forbid, the audience can actually get behind. Anderson took a huge risk casting an unproven comedian in such a complex role, but it paid off big time.
It might not be a particularly unique choice, but Andrew Scott clearly has great taste if he thinks so highly of Punch-Drunk Love. I wonder what he thought of Anderson’s latest movie, One Battle After Another. Maybe it needed more Sandler after all.
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