Andrew Scott felt no fear when the script for All of Us Strangers first came his way—a little surprising given that he saw everything the project would demand of him then and there. “I immediately knew that I would have to go to a childish place within myself, a place that I feel like I’ve escaped from—which is a place of real loneliness,” he says on this week’s Little Gold Men (listen to the full interview below). “There was something I saw in the role that I understood immediately.”

Fast-forward to more than a year later, when Scott, after both wrapping production and enduring a SAG-AFTRA strike that delayed his ability to promote the movie, finally sat in his first public screening of the film in Los Angeles. “I felt like I was sitting naked in a room of 350 people,” he says with a laugh. “I know there’s a certain degree of nakedness in the movie anyway—physical nakedness—but I was kind of alarmed by how raw it felt.” He then adds, “But that’s okay. That’s my job.”

Therein lies Scott’s unique ability to plumb emotional depths without hesitation while simultaneously seeing the bigger, richer picture. In All of Us Strangers, he plays Adam, a screenwriter who’s living alone in a London tower block and has his world turned upside down with a few chance encounters. One is with Harry (Paul Mescal), a neighbor he slowly falls for. Another is with his parents, who died 30 years ago—but appear to him now in the form of Claire Foy and Jamie Bell, as if they had never passed on.

The blossoming of these relationships, within writer-director Andrew Haigh’s daring metaphysical conceit, demands an extraordinary vulnerability from the film’s lead actor—in the biggest screen role of his career, no less. Scott, who is gay, deeply identified with the story’s careful psychosexual impression of queer life and pain, and he brought a great deal of himself to the part: “I’ve never met [Haigh’s] parents, and he’s never met mine, but I felt like that character had to be a weird marriage between me and [Haigh].”

A guide to Hollywood’s biggest races

Scott’s pressing of such tender wounds makes for one of the most devastating performances of the year. His tears flow onscreen with the potency of a volcanic eruption. “There’s no way that I was ever going to draw on anybody else’s experience but my own and bring that, even if that makes me feel vulnerable,” he says. “I don’t really mind. In fact, I think it’s a bit of an honor to be able to show that side.” He’s speaking for himself here, but you feel that pride, that gift, as a viewer too. The sense of heartbreak, longing, and hope is so clear, so present, you can practically touch it.

This is not the first significant role of Scott’s impressive career. His portrayal of Hamlet on the London stage earned widespread acclaim. His Fleabag Hot Priest still inspires memes. But as far as top-lining an Oscar-contending movie from a major Hollywood studio, it’s an obvious breakthrough. “Your hope as an actor is that you’re not going to get pigeonholed, or that people don’t cast you based on your box office opening or even the fact that you may not have played loads of leading roles in film,” he says. “When I was growing up, the idea that a film like this would even exist, and that I would be able to play that role in it—it’s miraculous.” And Strangers, hitting US theaters on December 22 via Searchlight, seems to mark only the beginning of a far more public era for the Dublin-born Scott. He has the titular role in Netflix’s fresh take on The Talented Mr. Ripley coming up next.

Yet the unadorned rigor of this stage-trained actor, who recently completed a tour de force Vanya run on the West End, remains firmly evident. He embodies Strangers’ Adam with an intricate attention to physical detail. “You don’t want somebody pretending to be a boy, but you want a sense of the vulnerability of a child, and also somebody who is learning to fall in love as an adult—and how those things are intertwined,” he says. “I don’t know if that is apparent in watching, but it’s a very, very tactile film…. Even the way he is able to be embraced by his parents, and then learns to be the embracer of Harry, it’s something that I had to map out silently for myself.” One lovely scene later in the movie finds Adam back in his childhood home, wearing pajamas and curling up into bed alongside his parents—with, again, all three actors in question roughly the same age. It’d feel absurd, bordering on campy, if not for Scott’s gentle verisimilitude. “I feel very proud of it,” he says of the sequence. “It takes work.”

For Scott, there’s a direct connection between the way he plays a moment like this and the many frank, sensual sex scenes between Harry and Adam. “Adam wouldn’t have really touched many people in a long time,” the actor says. Haigh devises an authentic and gradual trajectory for the character to find himself sexually with the new man in his life—and it’s sold by the sweet, subtle chemistry between Scott and Mescal, who’ve become close friends out of the production. “We have a very special bond,” Scott says. “I think it added something to this burgeoning relationship, because we had a burgeoning relationship ourselves.”

This did not mean the sex scenes were straightforward. The choreography, developed with an intimacy coordinator, needed to be balanced with spontaneity: listening to each other, being present in the moment. Of shooting these sequences with Mescal, Scott admits, “It was a bit scary at the beginning. Then you get more used to it—and he’s great fun. The good thing about working with somebody that you love is that the process is really enjoyable.” The changing dynamic between their characters presented its own challenge. “How do you portray nervousness? How do you portray lust? That’s a really interesting one, and Paul and I’s chemistry in real life is actually kind of irrelevant,” Scott says. “I was playing a very, very lonely, quite repressed character, which I don’t feel in my own life—and that’s a great challenge. It’s wonderful because it speaks to me of empathy, and that’s what our jobs are.”

There, again, Scott reflects on acting in terms of execution. He examines the work, even on a film as intimate and humane as this, like a technician, bringing his best solutions to the complex dilemmas presented by the script. For a film that hit so personally, Scott had to turn inward for answers. “It takes a lot of mental work and my imagination—about what note you should play and, more specifically, when you should play it,” he says. “Our first job as actors is to power into that imagination, so that’s how I would characterize my experience—to really engage in that part of me that exists and is within me in so many ways.” Watch All of Us Strangers, and you’ll see that side of him. To the movie’s ultimate credit, it’s unmistakable.