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Paul Mescal is sitting alone, wearing a pair of Ray-Ban Clubmasters on the covered penthouse terrace of a buzzy members’ club in East London. It is midmorning and the climate is warm and breezy rather than clammy or close. Mescal – born in Maynooth, in County Kildare, Ireland, the son of a police officer and a primary school teacher – sits largely unnoticed and totally absorbed. On the circular polished birch coffee table in front of him is a £2 cigarette lighter, a tall glass of tap water and his iPhone, face down.
Between his hands is a paperback, a Patti Smith book that, no, isn’t Just Kids, but another, recommended, he tells me, by a clever friend: “I’m not too proud of being steered when it comes to stuff like that. I’d rather be a bit late than ignorant, I suppose.” From anyone else such literary piety could perhaps sound something like posturing, but with Mescal there is no hint of ego or vanity.
Truth is, he just digs the culture. Here is a young man who isn’t trying to present himself as anything other than he is. Or might be. (Just so long as he can figure that out, of course.)
You don’t need reminding: Mescal’s rise is a uniquely remarkable tale, one that could never have been before nor one that will happen again. One can’t help but wonder: what does it feel like to become a global superstar amid a pandemic?
Today, the 24-year-old actor, who went from virtual unknown to international heartthrob when the BBC’s adaptation of Sally Rooney’s Normal People aired in late April – a time when the world was locked down at home and thinking mainly about death, sex, loungewear and banana bread – is wearing a pair of those short shorts he seems to favour, matched with a loose-fitting polo shirt from Ami Paris. The brand’s logo, a red heart atop the letter “A”, floats above the left side of the actor’s chest, like an emoji that’s escaped a teenager’s phone.
I sit. He smiles. We order coffee (splash of oat milk for me; white with one sugar for him) and we talk about how he’s looking forward to his next project: his first feature film, starring Academy Award winner Olivia Colman and established Hollywood next-gen star Dakota Johnson. The project, which started filming in the Greek island of Spetses in October, is Maggie Gyllenhaal’s directorial debut, an adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s The Lost Daughter.
Speaking before his departure ahead of filming, we discuss how, for Covid reasons, Mescal, like all cast and crew members, will need to self-isolate in a plush hotel for a couple of weeks on the island, alone, before shooting begins. “Absolutely no complaints here on that situation,” he says, chuckling in giddy bewilderment, as much to himself as anyone. When Mescal talks he grins, and the sheer exuberance at all this – the work, the opportunity, the recognition, the stakes, the trip, the life turned upside down, inside out and covered with gold sprinkles – shoots out of him like white-hot lightning bolts of joy.
When you’ve sat in front of innumerable cynical, miserable movie stars, such enthusiasm is highly unusual; it’s utterly captivating to see someone so unapologetically in awe of his own good luck and toil.
“I became an actor certainly not by accident but late,” he tells me, settling in. “I wasn’t one of those kids who wanted to act from the age of 12. Not at all. In fact, my dad did some acting and I used to watch him in plays and just feel no desire at all to be up there myself, perhaps oddly.”
Turning 18, however, Mescal had to choose whether or not he wanted to continue studying. “I really struggled with that decision: choosing one thing to focus on that I wouldn’t get utterly bored with. Acting was something that I didn’t really know how to do but I could see how it would take a great deal of dedication. It was a team environment, but one with an almost hermitic lifestyle for the individual players – just going in and being totally absorbed by it. That really appealed.”
Was he always so performative? A show-off? The class clown? “Definitely not. It’s not something my friends would have pegged me for, not at all. I’d done a couple of plays in secondary school. I played the Phantom in The Phantom Of The Opera, that sort of thing, but nothing any more serious than that.” So what did he like about being up there under the lights singing and dancing? “Singing, yes, not dancing, thank God. I remember the correlation between absolute fear and exhilaration in the space of two hours was like an adrenaline rush I had never experienced before. I wanted to chase that feeling. I still do.”
A feeling, then. A rush. A search that had him go on to audition for The Lir Academy, Ireland’s National Academy Of Dramatic Art at Trinity College Dublin, to study acting. To his friends’ amazement, and his own, he got in. “I was fortunate enough to be surrounded by a bunch of great people there.” Your tutors? “Well, I went to see the likes of Marty Rea and Owen Roe [established Irish thespians], masters by their own right. But mainly it was people in my own year who, even by then, had more experience than I did. I got to see them rehearse and to watch their performances evolve into finished roles. It was inspiring. Oh, and I distinctly remember going to see Call Me By Your Name...”
One particular performance in Luca Guadagnino’s 2017 adaptation had a profound, lasting impact on Mescal. “Timothée Chalamet just smashed it in that movie. He blew my mind, if I’m honest with you. I was so moved by it, it sort of shocked me. He is on another level and it just made me realise what a young actor, roughly the same age as me, could be capable of, the level I had to get up to. I had hardly even worked at all at that point, but I very clearly remember leaving the cinema absolutely terrified by Chalamet’s performance, because I saw how high he’d raised the bar. That was an important moment for me. That and also breaking my jaw...”
Breaking his what? You see, the thing Mescal was clearly extremely accomplished at when younger was sport, specifically Gaelic football, a hybrid of soccer, rugby and, from an outsider’s perspective, bare-knuckle street brawling. It is a sport played almost solely in Ireland; a tough-as-nails contact sport that rewards players as fast as Usain Bolt, as dexterous as Lionel Messi and as fearless as Conor McGregor.
Mescal has the perfect physique for the sport: strong, piston-shaped legs with thighs like whole serrano hams (hence his preference for those short shorts, presumably), broad, muscular shoulders and a light, fluid touch to his every movement. You can just tell he’s one of those men who is in control of his own body, from crown to toe. You can see it when he takes a sip of coffee, takes a drag of a cigarette or as he stands to walk back towards the door. Not to get too frothed up here, but there’s poetry in motion with Mescal. He is a man just completely comfortable in his own skin.
“I was always the sporty one,” Mescal tells me of the moment he decided to stop being the sporty one and become the acting one. “I love sport, I still do, but the injury forced my hand.” If you’re a swashbuckling young Irish thesp, you see, the Lir strongly advises that you give up any dangerous activity that might render your fine, screen-ready features into a messy pulp of bone and brain – activities such as Gaelic football.
“I played it on the sly for two years. I had decided to give it up in my final year but then I got slapped pretty hard across the face and my jaw snapped.”
Ouch. What did Mescal tell his tutors come Monday morning? “I told them I got mugged in a shop. I was working behind the till in a garage at the time, so I told them, ‘Oh, my God, guys, you’re not going to believe this: someone jumped over the till, punched me in the face and stole thousands of euros!’ Luckily, they had no reason not to believe such a ludicrous lie. They bought it.” What do they say about actors lying for a living?
Mescal is someone who believes the only thing separating anyone, whether you, me or Timothée Chalamet, from greatness is sheer hard work. He took the injury as an omen to dedicate himself to his studies. “If sport was my thing on the side, I had to drop my thing on the side. No distractions.”
Yet although he switched mediums, his approach to acting isn’t unlike his approach to the sport he so loved and had to give up. “I do miss it...” What specifically? “The direct competition against another team, I think. It’s an addictive thing to feel like you are in control of your body in such a violent environment. A safe environment but certainly a violent one.”
The competition in the acting world is fierce, though, isn’t it? “Yes,” he says, laughing, “but it’s not quite so ferocious. I think about the sport a lot, especially in the summer months. You would feel the ground getting harder. When you train in the dead of winter you can hardly run because the ground is so drenched. When the ground starts firming up, the ball starts bouncing a little higher and everything starts moving a bit quicker.”
“Pretty. Cool. Project.” Three words. This was the very first email that Lara Beach at Curtis Brown, Mescal’s long-serving agent, sent to the young actor in regards to the casting for a TV adaptation of Normal People. It was October 2018, around a year after he had graduated from the Lir. “I’d been lucky enough to be working constantly, even before graduating, so when this came around I was match fit.” Mescal got picked up by agents before he left the Lir, not uncommon for the cream-of-the-drama-school crop. Among other theatre work, he had been cast in the title role of The Great Gatsby at the Gate Theatre in Dublin towards the end of his final year, a prestigious production that showed the first true indication of industry heat building around the actor.
“Of course, everyone in my acting circle, all the guys, knew they were casting for Normal People,” he says. “We all wanted the part and there was a tightness, a friendly rivalry, shall we say, among our group in Dublin. We all supported one another, though there was certainly a bit of ‘Let the best man win.’” Did his peers feel he was a shoo-in for the part of Connell Waldron? “No, not at all. We all were, in many ways. Nothing was certain or guaranteed.”
Mescal, in fact, hates auditions. Correction: he hates the part of the audition that isn’t actually the audition. “I was talking about this with Daisy just recently,” he explains. The “Daisy” he is referring to is, of course, Daisy Edgar-Jones, the “Marianne” to his “Connell” throughout the series’ 96-day shoot and the only other person on the entire planet who has a true semblance of what the past seven months have really been like for Mescal. “I hate the chat at the beginning, you know? The ‘How are you?’ and the ‘What did you do for tea last night?’ chit-chat. The polite puff. Some people like it, as it warms them up, but I just find it distracting.” For someone so amiable and chatty – so open – it can sometimes startle how blinkered Mescal is about the work or, rather, his process around the work and the commitment, he believes, it demands. It’s near beatific.
“We hadn’t actually watched it together, Daisy and I,” confesses Mescal. “Because of lockdown, we hadn’t done that, so last week we got together and watched the whole thing through. We actually ended up playing a little drinking game: every time Connell wouldn’t complete a sentence or any time Marianne would make an emphatic statement that made Connell uncomfortable we did a shot. We ended up talking over most of it, just reflecting on particular days, costume changes, memories. It was very special to get to do that with her. The thing we shared – will always share – is so unique.
“Getting to watch it over with someone who had watched you work in such a detailed way was just eye-opening for us both, I think. There was so much positive noise around the show when it came out, but I can safely say that we both worked incredibly hard to bring those characters to life, both for the sake of the production but also for our own careers. We knew how much it was going to mean, to be honest. We understood the significance and size of the job and that our relatively new careers would be judged for it in a very public arena.”
In some respects, once the series wrapped, the real agony began for Mescal. That window of time from when the last scene was shot to when it came out in April this year, Mescal calls “unfathomably stressful”.
“I went on and did another television show and a play in Dublin and I kept busy: we did a couple of reshoots. But that time was very, very difficult.” In what sense? “In every sense – professionally, personally – and it all related back to the fact that I had no control over one of the biggest moments in my life. It bled into everything: that absence of control was very hard to contend with. The sense of relief when it came out was huge, for both of us, I think.”
Fame is another thing that Mescal has had to contend with since the show aired. “Even as it came out, we were all in lockdown,” he explains, “so I had to watch it away from that support network, when really I just wanted to be around my family. Very, very quickly, pretty much overnight, there were people following me to the shops with cameras. It’s a very steep learning curve and not one I mastered immediately at all. It was a very interesting setting in which to learn the rules of being of public interest, for sure.”
So what did it feel like being at the centre of such a storm? “Brutal, if I am honest with you. Totally brutal. At first you think, ‘Oh, this is a bit glamorous,’ when someone is taking a picture of you buying ready-to-eat avocados and cigarettes at the off-licence, but soon enough you feel it begin to infiltrate your brain.” In what sense? “Just bullshit like caring what I was wearing before leaving the house. As an actor I think you need to remain fairly anonymous and I found the lack of anonymity difficult.
“I also don’t think a lot of those photographers are particularly nice; I can’t just shrug off the stuff they say to elicit a response. I know it’s all a game for them and these are very First World problems, but I’m not comfortable with it. Neither are my family. When my mum is seeing more of me on social media than she is of me in person, you realise you have become public property. It becomes a problem. No one gave me a rule book on how to deal with all this stuff.”
One way Mescal is dealing with it now, however, is quitting social media. “Twitter is just trash, isn’t it? Anything anyone writes is just taken as gospel. Although support for the show flourished on that platform, I’ve realised that, ultimately, it’s a place that rewards incendiary remarks and divisive comments.” Did these affect Mescal significantly? “Of course. You’d be lying to say they didn’t.” About anything in particular? “Everything! About the show, about my body, about clothes, all that stuff.” So he didn’t like being the nation’s new crush? “The sex symbol stuff... I just didn’t recognise myself in any of those comments, no.”
Did it help you get laid at least? “No!” he says, laughing. “And that would be a very dangerous avenue to go down if it did.” You’re a handsome man, I say, you must have had that sort of attention before? “Sure, but nowhere near that level of insanity. Really, by the end, I wasn’t even seeing the positive comments, just the negative. I became entirely addicted. It was a problem. Spending hours and hours just reading all these comments... I can understand now the mental health implications. It’s toxic. So I pretty much just quit.”
A few weeks later I chat to Mescal again, this time on Zoom. He’s calling from his Greek island and has completed more than a week of isolation before shooting starts on The Lost Daughter. We talk some more about his preparation for the role and how he hasn’t seen anyone from the cast or crew yet, although he did have a call from Gyllenhaal yesterday to check in on him. We talk briefly about his girlfriend, someone whose name he’d rather be kept out of the press but whose support and guidance has been “a lifesaver. To have someone to lean on through such a mad, mad time has been invaluable. Really, I don’t know where I’d be without her.”
Not one to rest on his laurels, Mescal has been using his isolation productively: learning to play the acoustic guitar. He gives me a quick strum. Spoiler: it sounds annoyingly accomplished already. “I’m learning fingerpicking, so I have a fair way to go yet,” he says, smiling, ever the humble, polite Irish lad. (You can be sure, of course, the commitment is as ferocious as ever behind that self-deprecating smile.)
As he puts the guitar back I notice a tattoo, sunk in on the inside of his left elbow. Is that a sketch of a crop circle, I ask, teasingly? Or a Mayan glyph? “No. That one I just got recently, but literally means nothing; I just liked the design.” He has others, however: ink that does have meaning.
“I have a small swallow, here on the inside of my upper left arm,” he tells me, pulling up his shirt sleeve to show me a simple line design of the bird in flight, about an inch and a half in length. “My dad and I always used to go into the garden around March to spot the first swallows of the spring. It reminds me of him and home, I guess.”
I tell Mescal I noticed what I first thought were Biro marks on his opposite arm when we talked in person back in London. “No. Those aren’t Biro scribbles, but thanks for noticing,” he says, chuckling. “That’s a deer, a stag...” he pauses, showing me the design, weighing up perhaps whether or not to divulge the tattoo’s full significance. “That, erm, has something to do with Normal People...” He stops himself going any further, instead weaponising that wide, bright-eyed grin.
A few days after talking I flick through my copy of Sally Rooney’s novel trying to find a reference to a stag or a deer. There’s a reference to the Stag’s Head, a pub Connell goes to with a visiting writer in Dublin when he’s studying, although it doesn’t feel significant enough of an episode for Mescal to get a tattoo relating to the scene.
There is one other reference, however, at least to a deer, and that is in a piece of writing by Connell, one he sent to Marianne when she’s studying in Sweden on Erasmus, unhappy and distant from him and her past life in Dublin. Here Connell writes about seeing a deer while driving at night: “To me it’s weird when animals pause, because they seem so intelligent, but maybe that’s because I associate pausing with thought. Deer are elegant anyway, I have to say. If you were an animal yourself, you could do worse than be a deer. They have those thoughtful faces and nice sleek bodies. But they also kind of startle off in unpredictable ways.”
Thoughtful faces. Sleek bodies. The unpredictability of nature in flight. It feels to me like something that would stay with Mescal. Perhaps I’m wrong. Still, there’s plenty of time to figure it all out, for Mescal to figure himself out. The game, for him at least, will be a long one.
Today, away from the noise and hype, on his Greek island with his peers, the air is getting warmer, the ground is getting harder and the ball, spinning, deft in his palms, has begun to bounce just that little bit higher. Everything, suddenly, is starting to move that bit quicker.
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