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On a midsummer evening in London’s Victoria Park, the sun is expending its final burst of energy. The emerald lawn stretches as far as the eye can see, an oasis of green in the city, a vision of—ah, shit, it’s starting to rain.
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Paul Mescal is unfazed. He guides us under a sturdy tree, where a canopy of leaves protects us from the worsening showers, the air thick with petrichor. Mescal, reigning king of earthy and emotional heartthrobs, lounges out on the grass like some kind of Impressionist painting.
Very rarely in life does it crystallize in the moment that a not-insignificant number of people would kill—I mean, commit actual human murder—to be in your shoes.
To get to the park, we’ve power walked along Regent’s Canal, one of the Irish actor’s favored running routes since he put down roots in London. The canal is lined with houseboats, their inhabitants grilling or having a drink on deck. Labradors playing fetch belly flop into the water. The whole tableau is almost illegally charming.
Though Mescal has, in 2024, done to shorts inseams around the world what global warming has done to sea levels, today he’s wearing full-length jeans, a salmon Patagonia long-sleeve shirt, and black Adidas Sambas. He has a soft mullet haircut, shaggy facial hair, heavy-lidded blue eyes, and a nose that could not be more Roman if it were wearing a toga and refusing to pick up its city’s trash. He sports, per usual, a small hoop in one ear. In a few days’ time, Mescal will begin filming Chloé Zhao’s adaptation of the best-selling 2020 novel Hamnet, in which he portrays another famous man with a dangly earring: William Shakespeare.
“My right ear was pierced, so I had to get this one pierced for Shakespeare. In the portraiture, it’s on the left side,” he explains. “I was like, Are you fucking joking?” (He obliged.)
Mescal, 28, has, in just four short years, established himself as one of the finest actors of his generation. In my estimation, he’s the most naturalistic. He possesses a very rare and specific brand of masculinity, both solid—thanks, in part, to years playing Gaelic football—and vulnerable. He cries beautifully.
By which I mean something of the opposite: big, ugly, unselfconscious tears. His roles, including his out-of-thin-air breakout as bookish jock Connell in Normal People; a lonely gay party boy in the fantasy drama All of Us Strangers; and an astounding turn as a depressed young father in Aftersun, for which he earned an Oscar nomination last year at the tender age of 26, often feature brooding, weeping, or a combination of both. When I ask him to describe a through line between the characters he’s played, he says, “People who want to be something so much but don’t have the instrument to play that kind of music.”
In internet parlance, those characters have been summed up as “sad and sexy.” Under our tree, we have a laugh at this, but he also wonders: Who the hell watches a movie like Aftersun, where his character Calum is so wounded and adrift and struggling with a mountain of pain, and thinks, Sexy!
“Watch lists for those people,” he jokes. “Big-time watch lists.”
To be fair: Twice, he’s read a script where a character’s face has been described as “sad” and, twice, he’s gotten that role. It can be jarring to realize that Mescal is technically younger than fellow 28-year-old Timothée Chalamet because he tends to play, and even carry himself, older; in Aftersun he was wholly believable as the father to an 11-year-old daughter. What is it? “Genetics? A bad skin routine?” he theorizes. He is handsome in the way your most handsome friend is handsome, and this, in turn, is part of what makes him such a believable actor and object of desire. If our century is defined by artifice and disconnect, Mescal grounds us back to the human.
Daisy Edgar-Jones, his co-lead on Normal People and one of Mescal’s best friends, told me that “Paul’s always been really okay in his skin in a really wonderful way.”
Andrew Haigh, who directed Mescal in the heartbreaker that was All of Us Strangers, also alluded to this innate comfort. “He’s always exploring and trying to dig deeper and find the truth of every single scene that he does. But he does it with a real ease,” Haigh said. “Some actors can be so tortured, and he’s not tortured. He does it with a sort of curiosity rather than any kind of painful investigation.”
I have interviewed enough young actors at this point that it’s almost easier to describe Mescal by saying what he is not. He is not tormented by fame or visibly aggravated by its responsibilities. He is not trying to prove how smart he is; not on some kind of oily charm offensive. He possesses neither arrogance nor false humility. In short: a cool guy, a good hang.
The last time I talked to Mescal was in 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and after Normal People—with its genuine, unvarnished depictions of emotion and sex and emotional sex—had, quite literally overnight, made him a household name. Our conversation was, out of necessity, entirely over Zoom, and he was deep into a multi-month press cycle during which he had to answer some version of “What was it like working with an intimacy coordinator?” hundreds of times over. He was 24 then and seemed to be chafing under his new visibility.
Since then, he’s traveled through his 20s, one of the most acutely felt periods of change in life, with all the attendant growth and loss, but at a magnified scale. “I look back at myself at 24, he’s a different guy,” Mescal says. “Everything was still so ideal in my head. I was so deeply uncynical at that age. I don’t mean happier in the broad sense, but it was kind of the montage sequence of, everything’s rosy in the garden. But also the other side of it has always been available to me. I understand the psychological landscape of the characters that I play and that isn’t just from reading the script, it’s from inside you somewhere.”
He has worked steadily and meticulously since Normal People. If there is a method, it has been to follow his taste. “I weirdly enjoy the intensity of the way my brain works,” he says. “That’s why I think I function better when I’m at work than when I’m between jobs.” (While we’re on the topic of work ethic, he brings up something else: “Maybe my toxic trait is, I don’t believe in work-at-home Friday.” I gently point out that Paul Mescal, movie star, is not exactly a job you can do from home on Fridays anyway.)
“My agent refers to me openly as a psychopath when it comes to work,” he says, alternating between intermittently tugging at blades of Victoria Park grass and tugging at his hair. “I feel an intense desire to have this forever”—the opportunity, the success, the artistic freedom—“I want this to never stop. So with that comes a kind of neurosis of control.”
I suggest that he at least seems more relaxed than when I talked to him a few years back. Mescal laughs with palpable delight.
“Do you think I’m relaxed?” he asks me, perking up. “That’s great. Thank God. GQ has endorsed me as chill and unaffected. Fuck it, let’s end it here.”
But we can’t, not as he’s about to embark on new territory altogether, exposing a much larger audience to his work than ever before: a blockbuster, his first ever, playing the lead role in Ridley Scott’s Gladiator II.
Already, something peculiar is happening when Mescal is stopped by strangers on the street. “The bros will come up and be like, ‘Can’t wait for Gladiator.’ No proper handshakes, lots of this handshake,” he says, pantomiming the handshake hug beloved by dudes the world over. “I’m an honorary bro now.”
The original Gladiator is a touchstone for men of a certain age. Ridley Scott’s saga, starring Russell Crowe as the gladiator Maximus, tells of honor and duty, and of a time long ago (AD 180) when those things still meant something. When what we do in life echoes in eternity. Even if its messages aren’t always absorbed as intended—see: resident Sopranos wackadoo and Gladiator-quoting obsessive Ralphie Cifaretto—it evokes nostalgia for when men were men, and not atrophying on office chairs filling in Excel sheets. Also, nostalgia for a time not so long ago (AD 2000) when Hollywood could still make a multimillion-dollar historical epic and pack theaters.
Mescal first watched Gladiator when he was around 13, with his father, also named Paul—the ideal age, with the ideal viewing companion. Over a decade later, producers Lucy Fisher and Douglas Wick took him out to breakfast in Los Angeles to inform him that they were casting for a sequel. With Mescal having passed muster, next up was a call with Ridley Scott, still formidable at 86.
During that first conversation, Mescal spent most of the time talking up his career as a Gaelic football captain to try to sell the director on his physical capabilities. Scott, meanwhile, had watched Normal People and been impressed by his lead performance. The director tends to cast based on physicality and, aside from the fact that Mescal has a profile that could be on a denarius coin, clocked a resemblance between Mescal and Richard Harris, who played Marcus Aurelius in the original.
“Very nice, very sweet, very straightforward” is how Scott described Mescal to me. “As they say in America, no-shit kind of guy, and I like that.” Scott had found his Lucius—a character we first see in the original Gladiator, attending the gladiatorial games as the 12-year-old son of Lucilla (Connie Nielsen).
Scott had no qualms casting a relative newcomer who hadn’t worked at a comparable scale. “I do it all the time. Brad Pitt hadn’t done a fucking movie [before Thelma & Louise], and Sigourney Weaver [before Alien],” he told me. “I take that kind of chance.” The role would also throw Mescal into the proverbial arena with legend of legends Denzel Washington, himself playing a wealthy arms dealer who owns a stable of gladiators.
Gladiator II was unlike anything Mescal had ever done before. Aftersun, which mostly consisted of delicate scenes of father-daughter interactions, sure as hell didn’t have a stunt double. He did all the usual prep—honed his body with a trainer, scarfed down sweet potato and ground beef until he was sick of it, put on some 18 pounds of muscle. When I broach my inevitable question about how much he, a man, thinks about the Roman Empire, he groans. “I studied it in school,” he says. “Thought about it when I was studying it.” (He’s more of an Irish-independence-through-civil-war guy, and would love to do a film like The Wind That Shakes the Barley, the drama directed by Ken Loach and starring Cillian Murphy.) For Gladiator II they shot a few early sequences in Morocco last summer, then flew to Malta, where the original was filmed, to shoot the rest.
Scott builds his sets to scale, and when Mescal strode into the model Colosseum, he was in awe. “First day walking in the Colosseum, he nearly died,” Scott told me. “He didn’t realize it was going to be so big.”
Mescal recalls Scott coming up to him before shooting began, cigar in mouth, and slapping him on the back before dispensing some words of wisdom: “Just remember your nerves are no good to me.”
By the time the first day of filming had wrapped, Mescal realized something: Whether he was in an intimate indie film or this $250 million behemoth across from Denzel Washington, “The feeling is like, acting is acting is acting,” he says.
He also had to get out of his own way. “I built it up in my head,” Mescal recalls. “I was like, ‘Okay, today’s the day that Denzel’s going to be on set.’ And I was so incapacitated by it that I suddenly was like, ‘This is so fucking stupid. I have a job to do.’ ”
Washington, for his part, told me that Mescal “knows what he’s doing, he knows how to do it. It’s easy to work off of him because he’s giving you something. There’s a quiet dignity and a strength and intelligence that he has, even just when he’s standing there.”
A moviegoer’s note, now, on Gladiator II: It is much bigger, rawer, and more violent than the original. The sprawling battle sequences, yes, but also the man-to-man scrappy combat. You will spend much of the movie mid-wince. “The only thing I will forever be angry at Ridley for is his deep desire to shoot at the fucking peak of summer, as a pasty Irish boy who does not do well in the heat, in armor, covered in fake tan and sweat, rolling around,” Mescal says. “Those fights were intense.” There is also a lot of Mescal speechifying to his men, and you get a sense that delivering locker room hype-ups to his Gaelic football teammates as a captain came in handy here.
It’s easy to forget that the original Gladiator is a supremely emotional film. I had forgotten it myself until I rewatched it for the first time in about 20 years. The poignant Hans Zimmer and Lisa Gerrard score? The atmospheric shots of the afterlife? That final death scene? (One male colleague told me that watching Gladiator in the theater was the first time he cried as an adult.)
“It’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing,” Mescal says, smiling. “You’re allowed to watch it and still feel very masc and macho about it. But actually the reason that film works is it’s an action drama. It’s got a real pathos to it, and all of the violence is motivated by somebody’s love and betrayal.”
So it makes sense, then, that Mescal, our premier young translator of male emotion and pain, would be the ideal vessel for exactly those things in Gladiator II. Lucius, heaving and covered in blood after one showdown, even recites Virgil—a poet-warrior of sorts. “He is comfortable in discomfort” is how Mescal describes Lucius to me. “He’s deeply un-entitled and that’s what I love most about him. He doesn’t feel entitled to the world, so he’s just scrapping. He has no sense of pride, which I think is a fun character trait to play.”
Mescal also reveals the top secret bridge between the two films: Lucius is Maximus’s son. Although the first Gladiator ends on a note of hope, the sequel finds Rome just as corrupt as ever, straining under the rule of decadent twin emperors. “Lucius has got a very clear propulsion and aversion to Rome, because of something that’s personally traumatizing from his past. Then you see him discover what his bloodline is,” he says. “So he begins the film with this hatred of Rome. As the film progresses, he realizes that he’s actually got an obligation to protect it because it’s falling into disarray.”
The Russell Crowe comparisons will be inevitable. Mescal shies away from them entirely. He didn’t get in touch with Crowe at any point: “I wouldn’t know what to say.” Despite how proud Mescal is of this performance, he doesn’t necessarily want it to define his entire career. “I think it’s also a mistake when people go, ‘This was Russell’s thing,’ ” Mescal says. “Russell had proven himself time and time again. And he proved himself time and time again after Gladiator. An amazing career like Russell has had wasn’t built by just Gladiator.”
Connie Nielsen, who reprises her role from the first movie as Lucilla, Lucius’s mother, in Gladiator II, said that she saw in Mescal qualities from both Crowe and Joaquin Phoenix—Emperor Commodus in the original. “There’s something about Joaquin that makes you sit up and pay notice, number one. It’s his willingness to stand in the world in exactly the way that he is and then synthesizes that into this unique essence—an essence that is really about the willingness to be vulnerable,” she told me. “And then you have the Sturm und Drang of Russell Crowe who’s just marching in and taking possession of the scene, the camera, and the character.”
Another difference with the sequel: Between Mescal and Pedro Pascal, in the role of general Marcus Acacius, female fans have been inordinately excited about the sequel and its associated thigh-on-thigh quotient. I mentioned this to Scott.
“Are you saying Russell isn’t a hunk?” he retorted slyly. “Russell is quite different from [Mescal], and he is quite different from Russell. It’s hard to put my finger on it, see. There’s a kind of vulnerability to Paul that Russell doesn’t have.”
A few weeks before our time together in London, Mescal watched Gladiator II, alone in a screening room. He went in a bundle of nerves, in large part because of some very practical and expensive reasons—about 250 million of them. “This is a film made by a massive amount of people for a massive amount of people,” he says. “That is the target of this film. You can call a spade a spade. That’s what I want. That’s what the studio wants. We want to make something great that lots of people go to.”
Within two minutes, he was at ease. What happened?
Okay, he thought, watching his performance. I believe myself.
When the rain abates, we retrace our steps along the canal. So far, nobody has noticed Mescal. I suspect this is, in part, because so many young men have adopted his style and haircut that the world is now filled with Mescal doppelgängers, such that you can’t even tell when the real one is in your midst. It is inescapable. Look-alikes have overtaken New York, where I live. At a tortilla restaurant in Madrid last fall, I saw a whole gang of Paul Mescáls walk in together. When I landed in Heathrow for this very story, I immediately spotted a fake Paul in the arrivals area, holding out flowers for his girlfriend. Mescal has, through his scruffy and accessible look, inspired and—when it comes to their shorts—emboldened men to be more thigh-forward.
He plays me a voice note from his younger sister, Nell, a singer-songwriter. “Shorts epidemic that you’ve caused…” she teases. “Too many men in London acting the bollocks.”
He has been thinking lately, what with Gladiator II and all, about things like bloodline and lineage and destiny. Paul and Nell and brother Donnacha grew up in Maynooth, Ireland (population, 17,000 or so), raised by a police officer mom and teacher dad. Though Mescal originally assumed he would go on to study law, he decided at the last minute to pursue acting at Trinity College’s Lir Academy instead. (He kept playing Gaelic football, too, until a broken jaw right before his third year of school put an end to his days on the pitch.)
His parents rolled with it. “They totally pivoted and supported that choice,” he says. “And I’m also lucky to come from Ireland.” Mescal compares the cost of his classical training in college—just $10,000 thanks to government funding for higher education in Ireland—to the price tag in the US. “How do you start your career, let’s say, $200,000 in debt, and expect to have any kind of artistic integrity with the choices that you make? What if somebody turns around and goes, ‘You can do this terribly written piece of work, but it’s going to pay off your college debt.’ ”
Consequently, he was able to pursue theater work in Dublin, most notably a production of The Great Gatsby, which eventually led to Normal People. And because he wasn’t desperate, Mescal could hew closer to his artistic integrity and do a movie like Aftersun, which moved him to actual tears. He remembers watching it at Cannes in 2022, then finding a curtain to hide behind and “bawling for a solid three or four minutes because that’s kind of what I set out to do from the start, a film like that.” In the midst of his movie career accelerating, he decided to go back to the theater that year to play Stanley Kowalski in a production of A Streetcar Named Desire.
Though he put theater on the back burner while he was a teacher, Mescal’s father was a stage actor in Ireland. Won some awards too. “It’s a hard thing to articulate,” Mescal says. “I didn’t grow up talking about plays with my dad, but it’s something that, once I turned around and had an interest in it, he knew what it meant.” (Paul Mescal Sr., now retired, returned to the stage this summer.)
When Paul Jr. looks back on his last four years, his family ties have only gotten stronger. Especially, he says, when he got the news that his mother, Dearbhla, had been diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a blood cancer that affects bone marrow. A short time after learning the news, he had a panic attack on the set of All of Us Strangers. She’s now in remission. “We’ve always been a tight-knit family,” he says. “But I would say in the last four years it’s magnified by 10.”
As we walk back down the canal, the spell of anonymity is suddenly broken. One young woman gives a shy wave and a quiet “Hi, Paul!” This sets off a less-shy-and- quiet passing runner, who bellows, “Fucking hell! That’s Paul Mescal!”
“I know this is super lame, but can I please have a selfie?” another runner stops to ask. He starts ticking through all of Mescal’s projects he admires, so excited he’s dangerously close to falling into the canal.
Mescal turns to me after our new friend has run off. “My favorite kind of interaction,” he says. “Sweet boy. He’s just sweet.” Yet another runner passing us from behind informs us that “it’s so funny watching everyone’s reaction as you walk past them.” So much for going incognito.
We part ways at a Lime bike stand, the rentable electric cycles being his preferred mode of transportation these days. He will ride off through the streets, where people might spot Paul Mescal going by, or perhaps just write it off as another look-alike.
The next evening, I’m waiting at the Library bar at the NoMad hotel. The stately mahogany enclave is playing host to a table of rowdy 20-somethings, where an American woman is holding court, telling a story about the comic arc of a relationship that began with meeting a guy in a hot dog costume and devolved into her realizing she was the other woman.
When Mescal arrives slightly late and flustered, an actual hush falls over the room. The hot dog cheater story trails off. Mescal had been trying to park his Lime bike, but there were no spots right in front of the hotel, so he had to circle around the block. Next thing he knew, he was getting stopped for selfies.
Once he collects himself, he tells the server he wants something nonalcoholic and sweet. He is brought a pineapple-flavored beverage garnished with basically an entire palm frond. It is a ridiculous drink, but he somehow does not look ridiculous drinking it. He sucks it down quickly and will go on to ask for two more; by round three I have to order one myself. Bar snacks are brought to our table, and he chomps away at the nuts while assiduously avoiding a small plate of olives.
“Can’t do olives,” Mescal says. “I ate tapenade by accident once….”
“Well, I was just about to ask what happened between 24 and 28 that made you more cynical,” I say.
“Yeah, I’ll bring it all back to that. Tapenade, yeah,” he says. “No, it’s nothing to do with events. I think it’s a culmination of multiple life experiences where you suddenly start to see that the world that you’ve experienced as a child, which is so formative, isn’t as comfortable as you think it is. Shit happens. And that’s going to change the way you operate.”
Mescal is at the stage of fame where privacy is a tenuous concept. He can and likely will be photographed anytime he goes out—partying at Glastonbury or at a club. His romantic life is a source of frenzied speculation. I recognize the sweater he has on today, black and with a white stallion on it, in part because there were recent paparazzi shots of him wearing it on an apparent shopping trip with the musician Gracie Abrams. In May he was photographed smoking cigarettes and laughing with a newly divorced Natalie Portman and it lit the internet on fire. And, of course, there was his very public courtship, then relationship and eventual breakup, with the musician Phoebe Bridgers.
All of this has come to inform how he operates—the boundaries he has set up.
“I’ve learned that there’s certain lines in the sand now for me that just are going to be impenetrable for the benefit of my own sanity, but also the benefit of my work. Because I think if you don’t have those boundaries up in terms of lines in the sand in regards to your private life, people know way too much about you and then they can’t invest in the imagined landscape of your character because they know what your favorite thing to eat for breakfast is,” he says.
“I mean, the speculation has been kind of mad for the last x amount of years,” Mescal adds. “I’m not comfortable inviting any access into that part of my life. How I am in my private life is so precious to me because I get very little of it, and it might be public interest, but it’s not public-obligated information.”
Here’s where I notice another difference from the last time we talked four years ago. Back then, he was experiencing that first bloom of fame, and all that came with it, and seemed noticeably tense about it. Now, he might not love it—definitely does not love it—but he’s learned to be more outwardly sanguine. “Better that somebody has a strong opinion about you rather than no opinion at all, even if it’s wrong,” Mescal says. “You know who you are behind closed doors, and that’s the private bit that needs to be protected.”
He keeps his circle of friends close, many of them from growing up or former costars like Daisy Edgar-Jones and Saoirse Ronan. (While we’re talking, Josh O’Connor and Andrew Scott, who have separately played his gay lovers in films, send him a selfie of the two of them together.)
Even if he doesn’t have public social media accounts, it doesn’t mean he’s not scrolling. Back last winter, there were rumors, inflamed via TikTok videos, that Mescal would have one-night stands, take them for walks in the park the next day, point out a bird or a tree, and then take off running in another direction.
“Ohhhhhhh,” he moans, head in his hands, when I bring it up. He stays there for a while, belly laughing and turning red. “Fucking hell!”
Those videos first came out around the holidays when he was with his siblings. “We were looking at the videos and we were pissing ourselves at it. Categorically untrue. And we were laughing, laughing, laughing, laughing,” he says. “And the one thing that upset me was that I was in the kitchen, I remember my mum looking at the videos and she was getting upset. Isn’t that devastating? I was like, Oh, it’s funny to us—my brother, me, my sister—because we know that this is the way the internet works. It’s hilarious. If it was true, it’d be fucking bad, but as a rumor, it’s funny. Then I was like, Oh, if you’re a mother, her impulse is to come out and be like, ‘He wouldn’t do this.’ ”
We laugh some more and we move on, but then we round our way back to the subject because he’s nervous. That it came up at all, that he responded in any way that could have fanned the flames.
Later still, he’s absentmindedly toying with some of the books on the bar’s bookshelf, and finds himself picking up a set titled London’s Hidden Walks.
“Three volumes,” he says. And then he just can’t help himself. “I should take these for my running-away dates.”
Meeting Mescal, once again at an inflection point, I take stock: There have not been any missteps. There is no teen show that haunts his past, no embarrassing performances. (Though there is one old Denny Sausages commercial: “That paid for my rent for five months, so I’ll hear no Denny’s slander.”) The road ahead, already flush with possibilities, seems even more bountiful.
In short, it was good to be Paul Mescal back in 2020, and it remains good to be Paul Mescal now. Even better, actually. “I know Gladiator is by far and away the biggest thing I’ve done in terms of a public-facing responsibility, and the amount of people that are going to get to it. But I think I’ve now built in personal infrastructure where I know the map of what I want to be as an actor,” he says. “So it’s not the be-all and end-all.”
There are bigger films in the pipeline but smaller ones too. Theater again. He has plenty of directors he wants to work with, and work with again, and he dreams of “a De Niro–Scorsese relationship” with Aftersun’s Charlotte Wells. As for the rumors of the Beatles biopic in which he plays Paul McCartney: “I would love to be involved, but there’s nothing set in stone.”
He has also signed up for another project that, in its unique commitment, will neatly map onto the stages of his life: a Merrily We Roll Along adaptation filmed by Richard Linklater over the course of 20 years. Linklater, who famously directed Boyhood over 12 years, is doing an ambitious retelling of the Sondheim musical about three friends’ intersecting lives over two decades. Mescal is playing Franklin Shepard, a charismatic composer who finds success at the grave expense of his relationships with friends and family.
The cast, which includes musical theater stalwarts Beanie Feldstein and Ben Platt, meets up every few years to film a segment. Because of the reverse chronological nature of the story, what he’s filming right now will come at the very end of the film. When they are done with this undertaking, it will likely be the year 2042. Mescal will be well into his 40s then.
“I would love to not be like Franklin, the character,” Mescal says. “Yeah, I’d love to be settled, married, kids would be nice.” It’s hard for Mescal to look that far into the future, though. He is a young man, with the present so firmly gripped in the palm of his hand.
As we talk more, I discover there’s another reason he shies from thinking so far ahead.
“I’ve always been convinced that I’m not going to live a long life,” he tells me, not with any sort of fear or pain. Just as simple as if he’s stating that the sky is blue.
I react as you might expect.
“I know,” he says. “People have this response, but in my head it’s never been drastic. It’s just like a gut feeling. And maybe it’s to do with the fact that I can’t visualize myself as an 80-year-old man.”
You seem strangely comfortable with this idea.
“But I’m also afraid of death,” he says. “So I think if death was to come for me at 55, I’d be equally afraid of it as I would be at 90.”
I don’t think anyone’s ever ready.
“No, I don’t believe anybody who’s like, ‘I’m ready for it.’ I’m like, ‘Bullshit!’ ”
Where did that gut feeling come from?
“It’s always in my head. I was like, Going to have a family young. I’m going to not survive a long time. Hopefully, I’m wrong. I think I will be wrong. But that’s just the truth around my brain.”
Ever the Gaelic football player, he compares the here and now to being in a purple patch—a winning streak. The neurosis is that it might end. He knows he’s in his prime, that people have an appetite to watch him work, and that one day that might not be the case and so he has to seize it all now.
“I’m enjoying it so much right now that I don’t want it to not be like this,” he says.
I boil down the emotion to its simplest form: When you’re happy, when things are good, there’s an undercurrent of melancholy because you realize life can’t stay this way forever.
His eyes light up. He gets excited.
“Yeah, but weirdly, in a professional context, it can. It can!” Mescal says. “It’s rare, but…yeah,” he exhales. “I desperately want it to.” I believe him.
Gabriella Paiella is a GQ senior staff writer.
A version of this story originally appeared in the November 2024 issue of GQ with the title “Paul Mescal Enters the Arena”
PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographs by Dan Jackson
Styled by George Cortina
Hair by Rudi Lewis at LGA Management
Skin by Miranda Joyce using Clé de Peau Beauté
Tailoring by Della George
Set design by Max Bellhouse at the Magnet Agency
Produced by Farago Projects
