Ruaridh Mollica wants to grow a beard, make a piece of furniture and find a pearl in the clutches of an oyster at the bottom of the sea. The actor – Italian and Scottish and handsome – tells me such things when we meet on a Friday afternoon at a private member’s club in London, joking about how wank-y the whole set-up will sound in writing – while, granted, smoking a cigarette and ordering a Bellini. But Mollica has nothing to worry about – as it turns out, he’s actually nice and deserving of his successes.
The two projects we’re here to chat about are a lead role in a hot and emotional gay sex work drama Sebastian and a regular appearance as a slightly frantic runner in Sam Mendes, Armando Iannucci and Jon Brown’s superhero series The Franchise (alongside fellow actor’s portfolio interviewee, Isaac Powell).
But it wasn’t always going to be this way: in fact, as a 12-year-old growing up near Leith, the port town near Edinburgh made famous by Trainspotting, he only decided to go to Strangetown Youth Theatre classes because a couple of his friends were going. He walked in with his mother. “There was a casting director there, and she just pointed to me and goes, ‘Can you ride horses?’,” Mollica recalls. Although he’d recently fallen off of one called Tangerine (“I hate that horse”), he told the casting director he could. It led to a small part in a crime drama called Case Histories, and from then, he caught the bug.
It was a nice distraction from a childhood spent being teased for his artistic inclinations, which made him turn inwards. Even though he’s exuberant and social now, Mollica was a little reclusive as a kid, spending most of his time solving Rubik’s Cubes in his bedroom, or with his twin sister. When he was 15, he followed her to Broughton Dance Academy, becoming one of the few boys to go there. When he was 17, he remembers wanting to dress like he was in the 1950s. “I never really knew who my friends were,” he says, “because someone would be your friend one [minute], then as soon as you’re in a group, you become the butt of every joke.”
“When I acted, I realised my heart was finally full again”
For much of his time spent as a kid actor, Mollica didn’t realise that acting was a viable career. “In my head, I did not clock that that’s how a job works,” he says. So he studied Computer Science at Heriot-Watt University instead. A short film called Too Rough, about a working class Glaswegian boy who had to hide his secret boyfriend from his parents, reignited his love for acting. “I had convinced myself that I love computer science [instead],” Mollica says, but when shooting it, “I realised my heart was finally full again.” Despite getting into University College London to do a masters in Cybersecurity, he turned it down, and moved to London in January 2022 to make the acting thing work instead.
He got the part in Sebastian – about a young novelist who, in an effort to get to the heart of his story on sex workers, becomes one – a year before shooting began, paying his bills by working at a menswear concession in Selfridges. After Mollica was cast, director Mikko Mäkelä made the character Scottish so he could feel closer to him. Similarly, while Mollica’s character Max was “dealing with self acceptance in terms of sex work, I was dealing with it in terms of my queerness.” The film premiered to strong reviews at Sundance in January. Mollica was there, rubbing shoulders with directors like the Duplass Brothers and Eliza Hittman, but failed to pack properly for the freezing weather. “It’s called Sundance,” he quips.
He’s since done the Los Angeles thing, meeting managers and industry people, and made his mark on The Franchise. Next, he’ll have a small part in Steven Knight’s A Thousand Blows, an icy Scandi drama called Sukkwan Island and Joe, a queer drama based on the novel The Whale Tattoo. Despite his myriad wants, there’s only one professional desire that really matters to him: one day he’d like to win a Scottish BAFTA. “To me, it’s the most important one,” he says. “Because it feels like home.”
Photography: Jackson Bowley
Writer: Douglas Greenwood