I’m waiting in the corridors of London’s Soho Hotel, and Paul Mescal is already 25 minutes late. I wonder, has the actor—the 27-year-old Irish heartthrob who’s gone from Normal People’s quietly thoughtful and sensitive Connell Waldron to the Oscar-nominated, Olivier Award-winning, Gucci and Cartier-clad star of Aftersun and A Streetcar Named Desire in just four short years (and is now poised to enter his blockbuster era as the lead of Ridley Scott’s Gladiator 2)—gone full Hollywood? Not at all, as it turns out. When he finally arrives, dressed casually in blue jeans, a white T-shirt, and Adidas trainers, he looks positively bereft, lowering his piercing blue eyes and apologizing profusely for the delay. We sit down and start our interview, but he keeps apologizing—and continues to do so even after our chat, as I take the lift back down to the lobby with him. I’m thoroughly charmed—and convinced, not that I needed much convincing, that he’s a Connell through and through.
Mescal’s magnetism is as pronounced on screen as it is off it—and undeniable in his latest role: Harry, the mysterious and flirtatious neighbor of Andrew Scott’s brooding screenwriter Adam in Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers, which is now in cinemas. A profoundly personal project for its director, who himself came of age as a gay man in the late ’80s, the surreal romance follows Adam as he looks back on his youth and, upon visiting his childhood home, finds his parents (Jamie Bell and Claire Foy)—who died in a car accident when he was 12—somehow living there, as if it’s still 1987. It offers him an opportunity he never had—to come out to them and, hopefully, be accepted. Meanwhile, back in the steely tower block in which he now lives, Adam begins a relationship with Harry, an effusive presence who, nevertheless, has demons of his own, too. Soon, these two worlds collide to head-spinning effect.
His part recently earned Mescal a BAFTA nomination for best supporting actor, but it isn’t the only performance that’ll keep him firmly in the awards conversation in the weeks, months, and years to come: there’s Ridley Scott’s forthcoming swords-and-sandals epic, of course (which I cannot, under any circumstances—as I’ve been repeatedly told by publicists—ask Mescal about), but also Oscar winner Chloé Zhao’s take on Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet, in which he’ll play a roguish young Shakespeare, and industry stalwart Richard Linklater’s new musical, Merrily We Roll Along, which will be—wait for it—filmed over the course of 20 years.
Below, the actor talks us through all of these current and upcoming projects, and opens up about his sex scenes with Andrew Scott, tearing up on the press tour, and why he hopes to be happier in 2024.