Andrew Scott on ‘Vanya’: ‘Who Isn’t Sad?’

“I really believe that we all do contain multitudes,” Andrew Scott said on a Friday morning in March. Scott may contain more than most. An actor of unusual sensitivity and verve, he is starring, solo, in an Off Broadway production of Chekhov’s melancholy comedy “Uncle Vanya.” The title, like the cast list, has also been condensed, to just “Vanya.”

The New York transfer of this London production had opened a few nights before. In this version, the playwright Simon Stephens has relocated the action from 19th-century Russia to rural Ireland in more or less the present day. Scott plays the central character, a man who has sacrificed his own ambition to support his feckless brother-in-law. He also plays the brother-in-law, the put-upon niece, the neglected young wife, and several others. Scott is alone onstage throughout. That stage can feel very crowded.

The New York Times critic Jesse Green described Scott, in performance, as a “human Swiss Army knife.” Mindful of Scott’s work in “Fleabag,” “Ripley” and the recent film “All of Us Strangers,” Green also referred to Scott as a “sadness machine.” This is a popular opinion. Variety has called him “Hollywood’s new prince of heartache.”

On this morning, Scott, 48, did not appear unusually sad, though he was somewhat rumpled. The plan had been to walk over to Little Island and then along the Hudson River, toward the theater, but severe weather had changed that.

“Oh my God, it’s windy,” he said, out on the street. (“You can’t get sick,” his publicist fretted.) So Scott had retreated, with a breakfast burrito and a Day-Glo orange juice, to the shelter of a nearby pier. Its windows looked out onto the river. The water — choppy, gray-green — reflected in his eyes.