There’s a giddy Proustian effect upon encountering Paul Mescal at Claridge’s in London. Here, in a hotel room not unlike the one we are sitting in, the Irish actor, star of the new blockbuster Gladiator II, filmed Scarlet, a freewheeling selfie-style music video, for The Rolling Stones.
It was 2020, “slap-bang at the start of Covid”, as he puts it. That delightfully goofy promo arrived slap-bang at the start of the Paul Mescal phenomenon, at a moment when 130,000 people started to gather around an Instagram account devoted to the gold chain that his character wore in the TV series Normal People.
It has been quite an adventure.
In 2023 he was nominated for an Oscar and a Bafta for Aftersun, a British indie hit anchored by his performance as a suicidal single dad. While other nominees jostled for coverage on chatshows and in trade papers, Mescal cannily let his acting do the talking in the West End revival of A Streetcar Named Desire. His turn as Stanley Kowalski earned a Laurence Olivier Award. He will also take the role to New York with a staging of Streetcar at the Brooklyn Academy of Music next spring.
This year he returned to the Bafta red carpet to compete with Robert Downey jnr and Ryan Gosling in the best-supporting-actor category for his wistful work on All of Us Strangers. Careerwise, he hasn’t put a foot wrong, surely.
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“Oh, I think I have,” Mescal says. “I’ve put certain feet wrong. But I think I have acquired a taste for what I like. What I like has been my North Star. And I’ve been very lucky that the directors who are making the things I like want to work with me as well. That’s a big part of the choices that I’ve made.”
After Mad Max: Fury Road and Top Gun: Maverick, Gladiator II is the latest long-delayed Hollywood sequel. Arriving 24 years after Russell Crowe’s titular General Maximus took on Joaquin Phoenix’s reprobate Emperor Commodus, the second film in the sequence – a third is reportedly under way – was in development from 2001, when Gladiator won five Oscars, including for best picture and best actor, and took more than €400 million at the box office. It’s a tricky one, as – spoiler alert – both the protagonist and antagonist died at the end.
One draft, written by the musician Nick Cave, featured Crowe’s combatant awakening in a gloomy afterlife where he cuts a deal with various Roman gods to return to life, time-travelling through various historical conflicts, including the Crusades, the second World War and the Vietnam War. Another version saw Crowe’s character revived by the Roman deities and tasked with killing Jesus.
Mescal first watched the original at the age of 13 with his schoolteacher dad. He avoided revisiting the material once he was cast as Lucius, the grandson of Richard Harris’s Emperor Marcus Aurelius from the first film.
“I’d seen it so many times, with no knowledge or thought of there ever being a second Gladiator,” says the actor, who is now 28. “It was definitely a decision that protected me. I feel it worked for this, because I think the script draws comparisons between Maximus and Lucius. But that’s a screenplay. I spent my time avoiding the first one to try and find the character and story for myself. It’s a battle this film has to navigate anyway, that separation. There’s no point in making a second one unless you have some degree of separation.”
Gladiator II retains one of Cave’s sequences set in the Colosseum, wherein the emperor watches a mock naval battle in the flooded amphitheatre. In the musician’s version the waters were infested with alligators; in Gladiator II, Mescal and his fellow fighters are menaced by sharks. It’s a characteristically audacious gambit from a film that privileges spectacle over narrative.
In Gladiator, Phoenix’s character summarises the plot as being about “the general who became a slave, the slave who became a gladiator, the gladiator who defied an emperor”.
The sequel follows a similar template. Mescal’s Lucius loses his wife in an opening Numidian battle sequence. He returns to Rome as a slave and a gladiator, championed by Denzel Washington’s Macrinus, and is uneasily reunited with his estranged mother, Lucilla (Connie Nielsen). Joseph Quinn and Fred Hechinger’s ginger-haired co-emperors occupy a Joaquin Phoenix-sized gap.
Mescal told Graham Norton recently, on his BBC chatshow, that he was so nervous about meeting Washington that he dodged him for his first 24 hours on set. Was he starstruck?
“I’m very much in awe of his talent and what he means to a lot of people,” says Mescal. “Young actors have grown up watching him. I don’t think you’re doing anybody a courtesy by getting starstruck. You should see him as an actor and not as somebody who’s famous.
“I would hope that, if I got a fraction of what he has, nobody looked at me with that precious quality. I don’t know how I would deal with that. I just loved working with him. He was incredibly generous. He just makes you fundamentally better by being in a scene with you.”
Gladiator II is much gorier than the first film, and the gladiators, including Mescal, are considerably more swole. Mescal refused to give up alcohol and smoking during his training regime, but he did do endless chest presses, eat chicken, ride horses and learn how to wield a sword.
“That’s the fun part,” he says. “There’s lots of physical things that I have to satiate my very much undiagnosed ADHD. I can go do this for the day and then this for the day. Horse riding was a huge skill to learn and something which I absolutely adored. Obviously, the fight choreography and all of that just took up a huge amount of time. There’s no quick fix for all that.”
Much has been written – and memed – about Mescal’s softboi brand of masculinity. In a recent paper entitled Masculinities on Display: Celebrity Influence on Gender Performance, Angelos Bollas of Maynooth University – in Mescal’s Co Kildare hometown – became the latest academic to ponder ideas such as the way “Paul Mescal and Barry Keoghan’s androgynous fashion styles in red-carpet appearances and magazine photoshoots challenge traditional norms of masculinities”.
Gladiator II proves another showcase for Mescal’s tough and tender masculinity. The actor beat Austin Butler, Richard Madden and Miles Teller to the role following a half-hour Zoom call with the film’s director, Ridley Scott. Mescal didn’t audition; mostly, they talked about GAA. The actor’s sensitive take is markedly different from Russell Crowe’s wounded bruiser.
I didn’t even know I could go to drama school until I was 17 or 18. It happened for me at just the right time
“That’s something that I like doing as an actor,” he says. “I think that’s one of the reasons why Ridley hired me. It’s not me necessarily thinking, ‘Let’s apply some sort of sensitivity.’ That’s just my natural instinct as an actor, whether it’s this or Stanley Kowalski.
“This was a challenging arena to do that. He’s a very quiet character. He spends a lot of the film not saying a huge amount. That’s kind of nerve-racking, but it’s also a great treat for an audience to project on to him.
“My access point into it was having to sit there and see your mother after you’ve been neglected by her for two decades. Regardless of any context, whether that’s today or in ancient Rome, I can’t imagine that was an easy conversation to have. I was excited about all those things. That’s the stuff I’m drawn to.”
Mescal was born on February 2nd, 1996, the eldest of three siblings in a close-knit, sports-mad family. His mother, Dearbhla, worked for An Garda Síochána. His father, Paul, was a keen amateur actor.
“I would say 60 per cent of the Irish population, whether they like it or not, have seen a family member in [Brian Friel’s play] Translations or something,” Mescal says. “We don’t have the same access points as other nationalities in the acting world. We don’t have the same access point as somebody who grew up in New York or LA or London. So why do we have so many actors at the moment working?
“It’s because we found a different way through it. It happened for me. Watching my dad wasn’t the thing that made me want to act, but it definitely informed something somewhere along the line. And I think it took the pressure away. Initially, while I was falling in love with acting, it didn’t feel like it was going to be a job. It was more a case of, ‘Oh, you’re good in your school play.’”
Mescal, who showed a natural inclination for sports from a young age, excelled as a Gaelic footballer, playing as a minor and an under-21 for Kildare and as a member of Maynooth GAA club. His swerve towards acting was prompted by an injury that derailed his aspirations to pursue a career in football. Encouraged by a teacher, he auditioned for a school production of The Phantom of the Opera. He was subsequently accepted into the Lir Academy in Dublin.
“I didn’t even know I could go to drama school until I was 17 or 18,” Mescal says with a laugh. “It happened for me at just the right time.”
After graduating in 2017, he earned rave notices for his theatrical roles in The Lieutenant of Inishmore, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Great Gatsby. In The Irish Times, Peter Crawley praised Mescal’s Gatsby, at the Gate Theatre, as a “butterfly of self-creation among an ensemble in constant motion and fluttering improvisation”.
Normal People, the BBC’s adaptation of the Sally Rooney novel, marked his transition to the screen. Mescal’s Bafta-winning turn as Connell Waldon was the best thing to come out of the first Covid-19 lockdown, in 2020. He followed up with roles in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s directorial debut, The Lost Daughter, the rural sexual-assault drama God’s Creatures and a reworking of Carmen, a run that catapulted him into the pantheon of young Irish stars that also includes Saoirse Ronan, Jessie Buckley and Barry Keoghan.
“My favourite actors are Irish actors,” Mescal says. “I love working with them. There’s a shared sensibility. There’s a natural wildness to them. We’ve grown up outside of the system, so we go off and do our own thing a little bit.
“In the films that I’ve made, I’ve spent 50 per cent of those opposite another Irish actor – Andrew [Scott] in All of Us Strangers, Jessie [Buckley] in [the upcoming] Hamnet. The world outside of the acting bubble makes a bigger deal of this. It’s hard to zoom out yourself and say, ‘We’re doing great!’ Because these are just your friends.”
Earlier this month Cillian Murphy noted that his brother and his best friend still slag him off despite his winning a best-actor Oscar for his role in Oppenheimer. Gen Z Ireland, says Mescal, do things differently.
“I think that we’ve actually evolved past that a little bit. That’s my suspicion, because it’s not my experience,” he says. “You get that the odd time. And it feels more affronting now because it’s an isolated event. We should take great pride as a country that we adapt to things very quickly. That tall-poppy syndrome was definitely once an Irish thing. I feel lucky that I haven’t experienced that.”
As well as Hamnet, Chloé Zhao’s adaptation of the Maggie O’Farrell novel about a grieving Shakespeare, Mescal has wrapped filming on the historical LGBTQ romance The History of Sound. He has also started shooting Merrily We Roll Along, Richard Linklater’s hugely ambitious adaptation of Stephen Sondheim’s musical.
For Mescal, who has previously performed music with his sister, Nell Mescal, and ex-girlfriend Phoebe Bridgers, it’s a dream project. Filming will continue over the next 17 years.
“The logistics are like a wonderful nightmare,” Mescal says, laughing. “It’s going to be challenging for everyone. But, like Richard says, you’ve just got to treat it like it’s your best friend’s wedding. Every couple of years you have to go. It’s a pretty special thing to be a part of. My musical-theatre-loving 16-year-old self is very, very content with himself.”
Four years ago, when Mescal became the internet’s official boyfriend, shaky camcorder footage of his secondary-school performance in The Phantom of the Opera was duly unearthed. It remains the actor’s favourite performance. Yes, better than commanding centurions.
“It’s always the first time that you’re kind of trying to find your way back to,” he says. “It’s still a huge buzz, but that’s the dragon everybody tries to chase. That’s the moment where my great love affair with this job began. I can remember that feeling. I remember that exact moment. There have been moments of madness and wonder since. But that’s where it all began.”
Gladiator II is on general release
