Paul Mescal is sitting in what could only accurately be described as an old man’s pub in London’s Covent Garden. Next to him, a group of lads in their 70s (an estimate but a confident one) chat loudly about a friend of theirs that used to be a runner for John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Close to every inch of the walls is covered – with bronze fish, Victorian caricatures, broken grandfather clocks, Beatles posters. Behind him is a plaque that reads “Hands off the barmaid”, and beside it another: “Dirty old men need love too,” which Mescal points to, with a grimace, as we sit down.
We’re here more or less by accident, but it feels like the ideal place to meet Mescal, who is famous in a very particular way. The majority of people under the age of 35 could tell you where and with whom he had breakfast on the third Friday of June last year, thanks to voracious tabloid coverage of his every move. Conversely, those over 40 are probably at a 50-50 chance of knowing who he is. A group of women in their 20s (an estimate but a confident one) sit down right beside us, and despite his vaguely inconspicuous look – a slightly worn white T-shirt, a smattering of facial hair, a newly shorn mullet – they recognise him pretty much immediately. When one builds up the courage to politely ask him for a picture, he is gracious. “Yeah of course,” he says, popping up from his seat and slapping on a kind smile.
He’s a pro at it by now. We’re over two years out from Normal People, the ridiculously popular Sally Rooney adaptation that made him the most harassed man in London during those early lockdown days. Connell, the summer of short shorts, the chain, all of it is in the rearview. How often do people ask him for photos nowadays? “Relatively infrequently,” he says, returning to his whiskey and ginger ale. “Like medium level. Most people are really nice. Some people are not.” How so? “[When] it’s a demand. The classic is like, a drunk fucking dude coming up to me and being like, ‘My girlfriend really fucking loved the show,’ and I’m like… You don’t need to be ashamed that you watched a television show, dude.”
Mescal has only recently resurfaced after a period of relative reclusion. Though he’s been working pretty relentlessly since productions reopened en masse in the back half of 2020, the stuff that’s come out already – like his excellent, understated turn in 2021 Oscar darling The Lost Daughter – has seen him in smaller roles, meaning he hasn’t really done the media circus thing for a couple of years. Instead, he’s been hopping back and forth between the USA (predominantly Los Angeles, where his girlfriend, the musician Phoebe Bridgers, lives), Ireland (where he recently bought his first home) and wherever the work calls. In his downtime between jobs, he’s toured the world with Bridgers’ band, snapping photos and sharing them on his secret Instagram, which he declines to drop the @ for. “If people find it, they find it – great,” he says. “It’s the way I was using social media before I hated it. Because it’s not pressurised with a million plus followers, it’s just photos of my friends on my phone camera.” But now, Paul Mescal is making the time-honoured transition from TV breakout to movie lead. The first of several leading roles shot during the pandemic, Scottish indie Aftersun, out later this month, reaffirms what we all suspected in April 2020 – that we’re witnessing the emergence of a generational talent. The film – a quietly melancholic piece by first-time director Charlotte Wells, about a father and daughter in the 1990s and their trip to a Turkish holiday resort – has been collecting film festival standing ovations like Infinity Stones. And Mescal has, once again, created a remarkable portrait of a broken young man.
As I order our second round, Mescal tries to insist on paying for the drinks himself. When I tell him the drinks are on GQ, he reluctantly agrees (but on drink three, he won’t take no for an answer). He’s got an infectious aura to him – fun, thoughtful, considerate, curious.
As he tells it, the photos with strangers, the paparazzi hiding in the bushes outside his house, the shouting on streets, have quieted down significantly since 2020 petered out. Back then, he had a few unpleasant interactions that have lingered in the memory. First, the paps: One was flagrantly snapping pictures of him, but when Mescal called him out on it, flipped to insulting him. “He was like, ‘I wasn’t taking a photo of you mate, chill, rest your fucking ego.’” His views on that side of tabloid culture is clear. “Rotten piss,” he says. “I feel like, in 15, 20 years time, there’ll be a real understanding of the damage, not just in terms of invasion, but politically, how toxic and dangerous publications like that are.” He understands, he says, why other actors have got so frustrated that they would “grab the cameras and fuck ’em on the floor”. But the tabloids, apparently, are bored of him now – at least until his next project blows up. “The novelty of being new has worn off.”
Then there was the time, shortly after the show’s release, when he was in County Waterford, southeast Ireland with some friends when he happened on, God love him, a hen do. One woman stumbled up to him and blurted out: “I didn’t think the show was any good but I saw your willy and I have a photo!” Mescal says, “I remember that was the first time that I was really angry. I was like, ‘That’s fucking rude!’ It’s embarrassing for you, it’s embarrassing for me, it’s embarrassing for my friends and now I have to say no to you. But luckily they are the anomaly.”
I wonder if he finds that Irish people react differently toward celebrities than Americans or Brits. “I think Irish people are incredibly proud and that’s a really nice kind of buoyant feeling and then at other times it can be like, ‘Don’t get too big for your boots.’” It’s like there’s a tendency to want to keep you humble, I suggest. “It’s like tall poppy syndrome,” he says. “I’ve witnessed it with other Irish actors or musicians. It’s kind of ironic because the fact that I’m saying this will lead to a portion of like, Irish mammies and daddies who will be like, ‘Well, look at him off on his high horse drinking a pint in London.’”
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He recalls his first brush with Irish mammy and daddy outrage. The day after Normal People aired on national broadcaster RTÉ, full-frontal nudity et al, a furore kicked off on call-in radio show Liveline (a popular gripe hotline). People, he says, were blaming Covid for the fact that there was genitalia on a public broadcast, and losing their minds over something relatively mundane when the country had bigger problems to contend with. “Just relax. Can we just fucking… worry about the price that people are paying for rent. One of my best friends is a doctor and he’s had to move to Australia. That’s what we should be focusing on and not the fact we’re showing willies on the TV.”
Mescal’s character Calum in Aftersun, like Connell in Normal People, is a kind, sensitive man on the cusp of emotional disintegration. Both have grown up in an environment and a generation where mental anguish is laughed about and suppressed with booze and drugs (Glasgow in the ’90s; Sligo in the ’00s), but their pain, whether they like it or not, ultimately begins to seep out of them.
The similarities are not lost on Mescal, who, while miles away from typecast, is carving out a sturdy niche for himself. (As a counterpoint, on the evening we’re chatting, he’s deep in preparation for a very different role, as Stanley Kowalski – the brutish domestic abuser made famous by Marlon Brando – in a London production of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire.)
“I don’t know what the fuck it means,” he says of being drawn to playing these types of characters. “I don’t feel like my relationship with my mental health is as tenuous as [it is for] the characters that I play, nor do I feel like it’s incredibly far removed. But I think it’s to do with the fact that it indicates a rich inner life and something you can really latch on to.”
In Aftersun, as in Normal People, Mescal has an unforgettable breakdown scene – 90 seconds where Calum, sitting fully nude on his bed in a rare moment of solitude, sobs his heart out. Conjuring up the emotion – and the tears – hasn’t gotten any easier. “It’s always really embarrassing,” he says. “Feeling like it’s what you wanted it to be, it’s satisfying, but I find sobbing hard to stop. But I know enough now about myself that I can pre-warn people, you should just keep rolling, because once it starts… When it stops it will just be done.”
This time around, Mescal, 26, is ageing up rather than down, as a 30-year-old father to 11-year-old Sophie, played by the excellent 12-year-old Frankie Corio. The biggest hurdle to overcome, he says, was figuring out if he could believe himself as a dad. “I felt like in theory I did. When I read the script I was like, I feel like I know what is motivating this father. He loves his daughter, and I don’t know what that feeling is, specifically, having an 11-year-old daughter, but I know the feeling of caring for somebody, loving somebody. And I was just hoping that if we transposed it into that, I’d feel confident [in what I was doing].”
Mescal stayed in Calum’s Scottish accent for the entirety of Aftersun’s production, but he wouldn’t call himself a method actor. There is, he says, a lot of exhausting, misleading mythologising around the term. “I don’t really go in for it. What I don’t like is the performance of how it’s like, more difficult. When you hear about actors essentially just fucking copying Daniel Day-Lewis, and copying stories about forgetting what his own fucking name is.”
He’s got a handful of other projects already in the can – an Irish indie horror called God’s Creatures, and Foe, a sci-fi thriller opposite Saoirse Ronan – and a few more waiting to shoot, like his period romance with Josh O’Connor, The History of Sound. Thus far he’s stayed pretty firmly in the indie lane, and he likes it there. But he’s got ambitions for bigger, more mainstream projects, too – to “do somethin’ a little bit shinier”, as he puts it. Just probably not Marvel. “This will be something that I regret saying, but at the moment it’s not something… It’s not been asked of me. So I feel kind of like ridiculous saying no when it hasn’t been asked, but it’s not something that I am pining to do. I don’t know if I would have the patience required. And I am deeply envious of people who do have that patience.”
What are the franchises that could tempt him over to the dark side? “There’s definitely ones out there that I’m like, ‘For sure,’ and I would definitely not give it the commentators’ curse and name them in this interview.”
The big road block on this path is the fear of having to leave films like Aftersun behind. “I’d struggle if that was taken away from me. And I think sometimes you have to make a decision to let that go for five, 10, 15 years and that would be really sad.” I mention the Robert Downey Jr. situation – a great actor who dedicated over a decade of his career to Iron Man and very little else. “I know that if I make that decision, I’m not going to wake up in five years time and be surprised I didn’t get time off to go to Turkey and make an independent film for two months. Knowledge is power.”
What Mescal’s looking for in a role is simple. “I think the idea that I’m probably more interested in is love. Like the love Calum feels for his daughter. The love that Connell feels for Marianne. That’s the real thing. It’s like, if I can feel like there’s a relationship around the character that I’m playing that I can really invest in like a loving hook… Well, that would be my in.”
At which point, as our drinks sit freshly drained, conversation turns (okay, I turn the conversation), finally, toward the great love in Mescal’s life – a subject which he has been pointedly, understandably, quiet about in the past.
Mescal and Bridgers have been together since mid-2020. Both were becoming exceedingly famous in the months that their romance flourished – Mescal for Normal People, Bridgers following the release of her knockout second album Punisher. Their first interactions came on the extremely public forums of Twitter and Instagram, sending the rumour mill whirling immediately. (Their tweet exchange, Mescal says, was gifted to him as a framed picture by a friend.) But they weren’t ready to share their relationship status with the world, so they didn’t. “If the relationship failed early days, it could have been tainted because people would’ve known and it would’ve been talked about… And then now we’re like… Our lives would be worse if we were still operating in that way of like, keeping it all hush-hush. Just fucking shit.”
When they went public for the first time last year, it was on their own terms – a trickle of photos on Bridgers’ Instagram account, sightings at events here and there. Every now and then, a photo of Mescal in bed with their pet dog will pop up on her stories. It was initially a nerve-wracking experience. “That was the anxiety of like, ‘Oh, fuck, does that mean that we are public property?’ And I think it’s like, no, that’s what couples choose to do. It’s just how I choose to operate.”
But Mescal has still got a strong grasp of what he does and doesn’t want to share. “I feel like I’ve struck a happy medium with like, having a public relationship be private, on my terms. And that’s satisfying because it just means you’re not travelling around under the cover of night, trying to hide your movements from the world. Nor will I ever truly go into depth with anybody about what that relationship means to me or what the inner life of that relationship is.”
The reality is, though, that it's pretty hard to talk about Paul Mescal without talking about that relationship and how it's shaped the post-Normal People years of his life. “That’s like, a cornerstone of what those two years have been,” he says.
He’s been on tour with Bridgers now a couple of times. He went on stage at Coachella and screamed along to her yelling-into-the-void set closer “I Know The End”, “fucking petrified” by the size of the crowd staring back at him. “It was awful. I don’t think I've ever been more nervous to do something.”
“We’ve seen the whole of America in a tour bus with our dog,” he says. “I’ve got to spend more time not just with her but with like, my family and friends outside of Covid, when it relaxed its grip over itself. That’s the truth – it’s just been a really fucking amazing time.”
Aftersun is out in UK cinemas on November 18, 2022.
PRODUCTION CREDITS
Photographs by James Pearson-Howes
Styling by Angelo Mitakos
Grooming by Josh Knight at Caren using Typology and Sam McKnight
Set design by Max Randall
