In the opening moments of Fleabag’s second season, creator and star Phoebe Waller-Bridge makes a promise: “This is a love story.” Fans of the show’s first season rightly expected something a little more complicated than that. Indeed, Waller-Bridge really did deliver a new spin on the old will-they-won’t-they trope, with her character, known only as Fleabag, forming an electric connection with a man known only as the Hot Priest.
As the priest, Andrew Scott somehow created a partner worthy of Fleabag’s wit, allure, and vulnerability. The internet embraced him with gusto, turning the 42-year-old Irish actor into 2019’s most unlikely sex symbol. As Waller-Bridge said when season two was announced: “Thank God for Andrew Scott.”
Before Fleabag, American audiences probably knew Scott best for his take on classic antagonist Moriarty in the BBC’s Sherlock; his and Benedict Cumberbatch’s ongoing battle of wits inspired rafts of romantic fan-fiction. That phenomenon, which the show winkingly acknowledged eventually, speaks volumes about Scott’s ability to spark with a costar. Still, the actor claims to have an exceptional connection with Waller-Bridge—something they discovered a decade ago while working together on the play Roaring Trade.
“I think it’s a very special one, if I may be so bold,” Scott said of their chemistry in a phone interview. “When I first saw the show, I was like, Wow, this is fizzing here! Usually, believe me, I’m not as forthcoming as that. Onscreen chemistry isn’t just about what you say—it’s how you look at each other. I think there’s a lot of drama in silence, and I’m a big supporter of that. ”
Waller-Bridge wrote the character of Hot Priest—introduced as the man tapped to officiate the wedding between Fleabag’s father (Bill Paterson) and dreaded stepmother (Olivia Colman)—specifically for Scott. “It couldn’t have been anyone else,” she said at TCA in January. “He’s just a magical human being. He can’t do anything other than be really complex and truthful in a character—so I knew that the moment I gave this character to him in my imagination, he became real.”
Their special connection is underlined in episode four, when Scott’s character calls out Fleabag while she’s delivering one of her direct-to-camera asides—something no other character has ever noticed Fleabag doing. The intimate, internal, shared connection she has with the viewing audience? He’s in on it too—and the first time he also stares down the barrel of the camera, it’s a thrilling, gasp-worthy surprise. “It’s very televisually exciting because you’re changing the form,” Scott said. “It’s about connection, and deep love, and seeing in its truest sense.”
The complexity Scott brings to the role was vital, Waller-Bridge said, because on its face, Fleabag and the priest’s forbidden-by-God romance could have been ridiculous. “It already seems like a setup for a kind of shit sitcom,” Waller-Bridge said. But Waller-Bridge’s work—including the electric first season of the spy-vs.-spy thriller Killing Eve—thrives on finding an expected narrative groove and flipping it on its head. “She’s not afraid to hold two contradictory things in one place,” Scott said. “People aren’t just vulnerable or just powerful, and it’s not just funny, and it’s not just sad. There’s a lot of nuance in it, and I think that’s why people responded to it in the kind of extraordinary way that they have.”
Despite all the cynicism Fleabag presents to the world, she reserves little of it for their love story. Really, Fleabag spends much of her time constructing walls out of off-putting behavior in order to protect herself from hurt. “I love you. I’m not sure I like you…all of the time,” her father tells her in the series finale. “I think you know how to love better than any of us. That’s why you find it all so painful.”
That openhearted approach, Scott said, comes directly from Waller-Bridge herself. “We’re both very big old romantics. Phoebe’s not afraid of the grand gesture. There are paintings falling off walls and foxes following men of the church around. There is a strange poetry to this work.”
The show also takes seriously the priest’s commitment to God—a subject often ignored, or poorly dealt with, onscreen. “It does feel like one of those things—there are still remaining taboos, especially in comedy,” Waller-Bridge said. “You can’t talk about those things. We’re precious and delicate, and don’t want to offend anybody.”
That taboo, of course, is also what gives Fleabag’s will-they-won’t-they its compelling crackle. “The dangerousness of writing that stuff was to push those boundaries,” said Waller-Bridge. The show’s most sexually transgressive (if not its most sexually explicit) scene takes place inside a church confessional, when the priest blurs the vocabulary of BDSM with that of religious rites when he commands Fleabag to kneel.
Scott, who grew up in Catholic Ireland, is aware of the damage the Church has done historically, but also wanted to treat this subject with respect. “We were both really, really concerned with the idea of somebody who is a good priest, who is good at his job, and who gets a lot of peace and joy from it,” he said. That the character is so thoughtful, soulful, and good at his job makes him a “genuine threat” to Fleabag, Scott added. But like Fleabag, he’s also got quite a bit of darkness and damage to him—something the audience observes in his relationship with alcohol. Scott was disinclined to put a label on that aspect of his character, but it was equally important to him that the Hot Priest have his own human struggle.
“I certainly don’t believe that you can desexualize any human being completely,” he said. “So to really try and show the human being behind the robes, and just that he’s allowed to be flawed in the same way that Fleabag is, we wanted his character to be in some way a match for her, just someone that she can’t dismiss easily. It’s no less deep because it’s messy and conflicted in some ways, and damaging. But I think it’s true for more of our romantic relationships than we might admit, certainly on television.”
In the end, the Hot Priest chooses his love of God over his love for Fleabag. “I love you,” she says as both their eyeballs gleam with unshed tears. “It’ll pass,” he assures her, even as no one watching believes him. “I love you too,” he then tells her, more believably, before he walks away, seemingly for good. It’s a bittersweet ending that also feels perfectly Phoebe Waller-Bridge.
“It’s very important that we know that he loves her,” Scott said. “That’s incredibly important to me, that fact. He loves her; he’s deeply, deeply conflicted. I certainly found it extremely easy to play, loving Phoebe, because I love her as a person.”
But knowing that didn’t exactly provide solace for Fleabag fans wanting a more traditional happy ending. “People have been so devastated by that scene!” Scott said. “We knew it was very special. Sometimes love isn’t enough. And I think it’s very sad, but I think we’ve all been in situations where you totally adore somebody and maybe you don’t spend the rest of your life with them—but their contribution to your life is unforgettable. I think it’s beautifully done. It was very special when we were filming it, and I loved the fact that they say what we hope that they feel before they say goodbye.”
