Just two dizzying years after bringing the nation to a standstill in lockdown lodestone Normal People, Paul Mescal has become an indie film star everyone wants to work with. How did it happen? He talks to Aaron Hicklin
The actor Paul Mescal is a lucky man – his words, not mine. In the course of our conversation – mid-morning in London for him, pre-dawn in New York for me – he uses the word “lucky” at least eight times to describe his life and career. He was very lucky to go to school in Maynooth, Ireland, where it was compulsory to audition for the school musical. Lucky, also, to graduate from drama school at the precise moment that BBC Three was casting for Normal People, the first bona fide hit of the pandemic and the show that turbo-charged Mescal’s career. And he was “very, very lucky” that playing Connell Waldron in that lockdown lodestone would bring him to the notice of three young directors: Charlotte Wells, who cast him in this year’s indie darling, Aftersun, and Saela Davis and Anna Rose Holmer, the duo behind God’s Creatures, in which Mescal inhabits the movie’s heart of darkness as Brian O’Hara, a returning son wreaking havoc on the dynamics of a remote Irish fishing village.
“I’m very much not a religious person,” Mescal says, over Zoom. “But that role did feel like it was delivered by some higher power in terms of what it represented.” What it represented was the antithesis of Connell, a character that transformed him into a heart-throb and tabloid catnip. Brian O’Hara, in contrast, is definitely not the kind of character to inspire Instagram tributes. No fangirls or fanboys would wish to be the silver chain around his neck.
