Andrew Scott will always be “the hot priest from ‘Fleabag,’ ” the 2018 British comedy series that put this accomplished Irish actor on the map.

Now Scott, out since a 2013 newspaper interview, scores another international breakthrough with a buzzy performance in the acclaimed queer sci-fi drama “All of Us Strangers.”

Set in a nearly empty apartment building, “Strangers” is a dark night of the soul as Scott’s character Adam visits his 12-year-old self meeting his long-dead parents, and has sex with the only neighbor (Paul Mescal).

“Strangers” is written and directed by Scotland’s Andrew Haigh whose “Weekend” examined a gay couple’s first 48 hours together.

For “Strangers” Haigh adapted a Japanese novel he’d read years earlier. “I could not get something out of my head: meeting your parents again after they were out of your life,” he said in a virtual press conference with Scott. “Where the novel is a traditional Japan ghost story, I needed to set it in England.”

“I didn’t — and still don’t — know about the Japanese novel,” Scott, 47, said. “Particularly when a screenplay is so strong, my job is to interpret Andrew’s vision of the story. So I deliberately avoided the original.”

Which differs in an essential way: Haigh’s shift of the sexual partner from a woman to a man.

“Look,” he said, “I’m gay myself so it made sense. That’s my starting point. But I wanted to tell a story about a kid’s gayness in essentially a heterosexual family. It made a difference. It’s about understanding love — and familial love feels heterosexual.”

“That’s why the film is affecting so many people honestly,” Scott added. “There’s a potency in waking up emotions from dreams. Sometimes you can wake up upset or really angry. It’s very potent.

“The challenge as an actor was not to think about that. There’s something very childlike for the character. He conjures up these people! The challenge was to go into a childish place, not playing it too heavily, and then the strong thing of falling in love. As result it’s a tender tactile movie about love.”

For Haigh, “I wrote this in the pandemic, locked in my house thinking about people, coming from an insular place.

“While the film is not autobiographical, it’s certainly very personal. People that know me can see me there. That’s my old childhood home onscreen where I lived until the age of 9. I wanted to be specific about the details of a life.

“I’m 50 now and as you live, you want to go back in time and rebuild and reconstruct. For me this was a film about reunion. It unveils your old past self and shows how you can move forward from that.”

“All of Us Strangers” opens Friday