Scotland on Screen: Ruaridh Mollica on Sebastian

Ruaridh Mollica is only 25, but he’s already a film and TV veteran. Born in Prato, just outside Florence, but raised in Leith, he fell into professional acting when he was 12 on a visit to Out of the Blue Drill Hall to try out for Strange Town Youth Theatre. “I went along because a few of my friends went there,” he tells me on the phone from his flat in Hackney. “I’d arrived with my mum and almost instantly a casting director asked, ‘Can you ride a horse?’ I said, ‘Yes,’ auditioned and somehow got the part.” It turned out to be a small role in the BBC crime drama Case Histories. “I had no idea what was going on,” he says of that first acting gig, “but I was getting taught how to act by Jason Isaacs and Mark Bonnar.”

More small jobs followed, including as a background dancer in Sunshine on Leith and a Victorian street urchin in a BBC educational programme. “I remember having nits at the time, and they were trying to put a hat on me,” he recalls.“And I said, 'I've got headless,' and the costume person was like, 'It's fine, it's method acting'.” By the time he was 16, though, those child parts were drying up, and people were asking what he wanted to do with his life. “I still hadn't thought about acting as a career. And also, drama school costs money.”

He opted instead for the 'sensible' route: he got a bunch of Highers, then did computing science at Heriot-Watt. But his acting ​​fervor was reignited when he landed the lead role in Sean Lìonadh’s bruising short film Too Rough while in his final year of uni. “My heart just felt full [doing Too Rough] in the way that it hadn't been in the same way with computer science,” he says. After some soul searching and another small part – in teen horror series Red Rose – he put a place on a Master's degree in cybersecurity on hold and threw himself into acting.

It’s safe to say the world of cybersecurity will have to manage without Mollica for a while, following juicy roles in Channel 5 crime thriller Witness Number 3 and Armando Iannucci’s satire The Franchise, where he plays an overworked PA on the set of a chaotic superhero movie. And now comes his first lead role in Mikko Mäkelä’s Sebastian. It’s a provocative and multi-layered queer drama following Mollica’s Max, an aspiring novelist in London who begins moonlighting as a sex worker under the moniker Sebastian. Initially, this side hustle is to add verisimilitude to a book he’s writing about an escort, but it becomes clear Max is getting more from these transactional sexual encounters with lonely men than just research material.

Mollica had an instant affinity with the character. Both had just moved to this big city of London, and both were going on a journey of self-identity. "Max was going on one with sex work, and I was going on one with my queerness,” explains the actor, who says he identifies as bisexual but prefers the term queer. “The circles I moved in at school and uni were not really queer circles, so I only started to learn about queer culture as I was coming out in London.”

Sebastian is a chilly film drenched in urban isolation, but its study of queer loneliness can sometimes slip into cliché and pretension. Mollica is more impressive than the clunky script. He appears in every scene, subtly conveying Max’s conflicting feelings of power and shame, attraction and disgust, that become more complex with each new liaison. One thing that’s not subtle in Sebastian, however, is the sex. There’s no discrete panning away or fade to black when it comes to the scenes in which Max provides a service to his clients. 

Mollica admits these explicit scenes did initially give him pause. “I remember when I first read the script, I was kind of like, 'OK, there’s a lot of sex in this. I'm gonna have to be pretty much naked doing these. These will be filmed, and it will be out there.'” But when he started to talk about the scenes with his director, Mäkelä, he started to understand the reasons for their prominence. “The more I talked to Mikko, and when we started to rehearse scenes, I started to realise how important these scenes would be and started to understand just how beautiful they would be. Nothing is too explicit; it all felt very artful. Yes, he's having sex, but what's happening in those scenes is they’re conveying Max's inner monologue, and you're noticing how Max sees these other people, and how that changes from the start to the end of the film. They really are crucial: some of the film's biggest conversations happen in those moments.”

After taking the piss out of superhero movies in The Franchise, he’ll soon be joining the superhero game proper with a role in Vision Quest, Disney+'s series centred on Paul Bettany’s humanoid robot character from the Avengers films. Discussion of Vision Quest is strictly verboten, but when I suggest this superhero gig might mean he won’t be working on any Scotland productions anytime soon, the young actor sounds crestfallen. “I'd love to do more Scottish roles,” he protests. “I mean, growing up in Edinburgh and seeing a film like Trainspotting was so cool.” It sounds like that film’s star, Ewan McGregor, is someone Mollica, who often sports a Rentonesque buzz cut, would like to emulate.

“Yeah, I’m a big fan of Ewan McGregor, who's somehow managed to do the majority of his career in his own accent, which is so jammy – I don’t know how he managed that. But I'd love to do some exciting Scottish stuff. There are so many incredible projects getting written and made in Scotland. So yeah, who knows what's to come?”

---

Sebastian is released 4 Apr by Peccadillo Pictures
Filmography (selected)
Film: Sebastian (2024), Too Rough (2022), Tell It to the Bees (2018), Sunshine on Leith (2013)
TV: Vision Quest (2026), A Thousand Blows (2025), The Franchise (2024), Ridley (2024), The Jetty (2024), Witness Number 3 (2022), Red Rose (2022), Case Histories (2013)

@ruaridhmollica on Instagram