The last time I spoke with Paul Mescal, we were unknowingly sitting by the edge of a precipitous plunge. Ah, Christmas of 2019. The young actor, already busy, but not yet a star, was about to appear in a TV adaptation of Sally Rooney’s second novel. The Irish Times had labelled him one of “five to watch” for 2020. Was that rash? The series could easily be ignored as potential fans ironed their undies in preparation for summer holidays. Mescal’s career could well just tick on at its then steady pace.
You know where this is going. Normal People joined sourdough starter and sea shanties as key phenomena of the lockdown summer. Joe Duffy was fielding outraged callers on Liveline. Jewellers were selling out of the “Connell Chain”. And the two stars built on that success. Daisy Edgar-Jones fronted this year’s smash Where the Crawdads Sing. Mescal appeared opposite Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley, both Oscar-nominated for their roles, in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s acclaimed The Lost Daughter. In May, he turned up in two acclaimed films at the Cannes film festival: Saela Davis and Anna Rose Holmer’s God’s Creatures, and Charlotte Wells’s Aftersun. That last film, presented at International Critics Week, can fairly claim to be the best reviewed among the many dozens screened during the festival.
What’s he doing now? He’s in London.
“I’m 10 days out from starting rehearsals for Streetcar ...” he tells me.
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I went to the cinema to see Small Things Like These. By the time I emerged I had concluded the film was crap
Oh, that’s right. In December he will play Stanley Kowalski in a production of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire at the Almeida Theatre. Can I safely assume that, when we last talked, he had no idea how things were going to work out?
“No. It’s a cliche, but I couldn’t have written this,” he says. “The act of making the work is always the present tense. It doesn’t feel odd because you’re doing it. But it’s at moments like this, when you’re reflecting on two films, and you’re also reflecting on Normal People, you do the maths and realise that all of this happened in three years.”
Cannes offered apparent confirmation that Mescal really was here to stay. Every now and then an actor has a golden year at the event. Our own Colin Farrell had two hits there in 2017 — The Beguiled and The Killing of a Sacred Deer — but he had already passed 40. Mescal is still only 26. Speaking in a slow, slightly weary voice, he gives the impression of a man still processing his rise. There is no sense of him being dazzled in the headlights. But there is a lot to take in.
It was important to me to get it right. That probably came from seeing actors come over and butcher Irish accents
“It was pretty full-on,” he says. “I went to a couple of festivals this year and Cannes is the one that you get the least amount of sleep at. That contributes to this frenzied energy. I was very lucky that both films were received pretty well.”
That helps.
“Yeah, I wasn’t going back to my hotel thinking: why does everyone hate this? Everyone else in the world is wrong. Ha, ha! By the law of averages that won’t happen again to me. Statistically, I won’t have two films again at Cannes that are well received.”
The fine God’s Creatures, in which he stars as a prodigal returning to windswept Donegal, does not yet have a release date. Wells’s extravagantly praised Aftersun is, however, almost upon us. The autobiographical film follows a Scottish father and his young daughter as they holiday in Turkey during the late 1990s. There is an implied threat to such a scenario, but, on the surface, events pan out reasonably idyllically. The film’s great coup is its quiet implication of a sadness just over the horizon. Mescal and juvenile lead Frankie Corio happen upon chemistry for the ages as the film works through a honed and cherished memory. I wonder if Mescal twigged the script’s qualities on first reading.
“I think the common response that an audience discusses after watching the film is the feeling I got when I first read the script,” he says. “I was aware it was a special screenplay. The screenplay was pretty substantial. It was 92 pages and there isn’t a lot of dialogue. Charlotte wrote what I’d call the stage directions so eloquently. It was all pretty clear to me it was spectacular. That doesn’t always translate. But here it did.”
[ Cannes 2022: Paul Mescal comes back with a bigger bang in AftersunOpens in new window ]
Before I caught the film at its second screening in Cannes, a Scottish journalist pressed me into a corner to rave about the quality of Mescal’s accent. He noted that he hadn’t just hit a generic, suits-all Scots; he had captured a very particular tone from a very particular part of Edinburgh.
“I wasn’t able to do that accent at drama school,” he says. “It was one of those that I decided wasn’t in my wheelhouse. Then something happens when you read something. I said: I want to be in this so much I will figure this out as quickly as possible. It maybe started a bit broader. I worked with this great dialogue coach called Maeve Diamond. It was important to me to get it right. That probably came from seeing actors come over and butcher Irish accents. I listened to um ... What her name? The Scottish band Garbage?”
Lead singer Shirley Manson.
“Yeah, Shirley Manson. That was a reference we pulled out.”
You heard it here first.
In earlier interviews, Mescal has clarified that he wasn’t any sort of stage-struck kid. Raised in Maynooth, Co Kildare, son of schoolteacher dad and a Garda officer mam, he excelled first at sport — notably, as Normal People later confirmed, at Gaelic football. He was a minor and an under-21 player for Kildare, but eventually had to give it up after a jaw injury. Though his Dad acted a little, the teenage Paul would surely have been surprised to discover where the adult Paul ended up.
“Acting crept up on me,” he says. “I didn’t know actors growing up. I didn’t know of any peers going to drama school. Had I lived in London or LA or New York, there would be a clearer path. I knew there were Irish actors, but none of them came from Maynooth. Ha, ha! So it was the school musical. I enjoyed that. I didn’t know you could have it as a job. I got through schools playing Gaelic football. Then in the last six months of secondary school I thought I might look into becoming an actor.”
Earlier this year, discussing her own upbringing in Monaghan, Caitríona Balfe told me some people “wouldn’t really interact with you because you’re a guard’s daughter or a guard’s family”. Mescal looks slightly puzzled when I ask if he had any similar problems as a kid.
“No, I don’t think so. Maybe that was gendered?” he says. “In terms of how stereotypes look, you would never look at my mum and be like: there’s a guard. She’s a Reiki fanatic. She’s into her crystals. She’s a little bit of a hippie. So, no, I never caught any stick for my mum being a guard.”
The great error I made early on was looking at Twitter as the show was released in the UK
Having made up his mind to focus on acting, Mescal enrolled at The Lir Academy of Dramatic Art at Trinity College Dublin. Looking back at notes for our earlier interview, I am reminded that he wasn’t exactly plucked from obscurity for Normal People. He had played the eponymous lead in The Gate’s famously lavish production of The Great Gatsby. He had been in an adaptation of Louise O’Neill’s Asking for It at The Abbey. He had appeared in Rough Magic’s productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Mescal was already on an ascending curve. Nobody can, however, have expected the surge that came with Normal People. The series relayed conversations previously unheard outside a certain generation. Mescal and Edgar-Jones’s characters spoke to (and about) a nation that was moving beyond the old repressions.
I wonder when Mescal first realised it had become a phenomenon.
“My instinct is to say pretty soon,” he says. “The great error I made early on was looking at Twitter as the show was released in the UK. I think there was a couple of days buffer between the release on the BBC and on Hulu in the US. It had created such a stir here media was already picking up on the pop culture references. Right? That to me was bizarre. An audience hasn’t seen this yet. But it’s already been hopped on by the media.”
Mescal says that looking at Twitter was an error. In earlier interviews he has pressed home that unease with social media. “Twitter is just trash, isn’t it?” he told GQ two years ago. He seems to have left that all behind some time before he began his relationship with the American musician Phoebe Bridgers (when I ask him about that particular subject, he politely explains that he’d rather not go there). That seems sensible. He and Bridgers haven’t attracted any poisonous gossip, but they are better off not reading even the low-level lies.
“Before Normal People I enjoyed social media,” he says. “Like any young person, I shared photos with friends. It then became not that any more. There’s a pattern creeping into the industry where certain roles are being cast depending on social media followings. That sent shivers up my spine. I don’t think that’s true of the projects that I’ve done. But I don’t like that trajectory. So I got to a point where it was like: either stay on this train until it’s the last stop or get off it now.”
If I was offered half of this I would have taken it in a minute
I wonder what his family made of the sudden, huge success. He gives the impression they are fairly grounded.
“I think for 90 per cent of it they enjoyed it,” he says. “I’m trying to put myself in their position here. I think they feel an immense sense of pride. I think they feel innately involved with how I got there — because they were supportive of that decision. I think it’s very validating for them to have supported me in the process. And we are very involved as a family with each other and in each other’s lives. So it is something that is shared and I’m glad that we share it.”
One early pointer that things were going to work out came when, late in the summer of 2020, he appeared in the video for the Rolling Stones’ remastered classic Scarlet. As he bounced about Claridge’s Hotel, one allowed oneself to believe he was no flash in the pan. Here was confirmation the world was still paying attention. Few others young actors can match his crumpled vulnerability. Few others can layer that asset so effectively with the rumbling menace he essays in God’s Creatures. The work kept coming his way. I wonder if there was any sort of strategy at this stage. Was there a theory as to how one made the most of the fragile commodity that is instant fame?
“When that came in maybe I did think: maybe there is something lasting outside the show,” he says of the Stones video. “But I also thought: it’s all cumulative. At the time, I was just thinking: this is great. There’s also tons of other shifts happening. We were starting a press campaign after the show was out. People still wanted to talk to us about it. As much as this sounds like a cop out, I don’t really remember the specifics of the time. I remember a general feeling of sticking a seat belt on and just hoping. Hold on for a little bit. You know?”
There is more coming down the line. He has shot a rural thriller with Saoirse Ronan called Foe. He appears opposite Claire Foy, Jamie Bell and Andrew Scott in Strangers, the new film from Andrew Haigh, director of Weekend and 45 Years. And then there is the prospect of A Streetcar Named Desire at the Almeida. We don’t actually say the words “Marlon Brando”. We joke about the looming presence of a certain performer. We laugh about the anxiety of influence. But there is surely no actor who is more indelibly associated with a key role in 20th century theatre.
[ Saoirse Ronan and Paul Mescal to play married couple in FoeOpens in new window ]
“Whenever I look at these interviews I am frustrated that I’m like: ‘Oh, I’m so excited’ or ‘Oh, I’m so scared’. I should stop saying things like that. But in this instance it is both of those things, except dialled up to 11. It’s one of the most famous performances — particularly from a point of view of acting styles. You can see in the film he was inventing a new acting style. It was entirely new. That is what I am trying to think about. It was a new play once. It was something that actors and a director in a room discovered for the first time once.”
After that, there is no grand plan to follow. There can’t be. Success as an actor depends on making the correct decisions. But it also depends on the right screenplays coming through the door.
“I think it’s a taste thing rather than strategy,” he muses. “I’m lucky that I have a team of agents around me who share a taste and share a desire to hopefully have a long career.”
This is where we came in. Nobody knew what was about to happen when we talked in 2019. The world went into hibernation. Normal People defined an era. Now the profession is scrabbling to get his attention. Mescal smiles his dry smile.
“If I was offered half of this I would have taken it in a minute.”
Aftersun opens on November 18th.
Correction
Frankie Corio's name was misspelled in an earlier version of this article
