Both on-screen and off, Paul Mescal is one of the most in-demand – and likeable – leading men of his time. Will Gladiator II change him? Telegraph film critic Robbie Collin considers the Irish actor’s career trajectory.
Sausage Paul, they called him. It was 2018 and Paul Mescal had spent the past year making a name for himself on the Dublin theatre circuit. He’d played Gatsby in a stage adaptation of the F Scott Fitzgerald novel and the Prince in a contemporary spin on Hans Christian Andersen’s The Red Shoes.
Both were well received and the Irish Times described Mescal’s career as being on a “nosebleed trajectory”. But bills aren’t paid by trajectories alone, so he also auditioned for and won an advertising job for Denny, a popular Irish sausage brand. In the resulting 30-second promo, Mescal is inspired by the sausage’s meaty flavour to travel the world: he spins a globe, lays a finger on its surface at random and ends up on a coach to Ballyhaunis, in western Ireland.
During the shoot, Mescal ate 15 sausages because he felt it would have been rude to spit the chewings into the bucket provided. He was paid £5000 (NZ$10,850), which covered his rent for five months. (His parents, now retired, were a schoolteacher and a policewoman: no family wealth to shore up the early career here.) The ad became a sensation in Ireland – and with it, Mescal became Sausage Paul to his friends. Only for a few months, though. The 21-year-old was about to go a lot further than Ballyhaunis.
Six years later, Mescal is about to star in Gladiator II, one of the most hotly anticipated blockbuster sequels in an age. It is directed by Ridley Scott, as was the 2000 original, which won five Oscars including Best Picture and made half a billion dollars when Mescal was 4. In this one, Mescal plays Lucius, the son of Russell Crowe’s Maximus, who is similarly forced into slavery and then trained (by Denzel Washington’s machiavellian Macrinus) as a circus combatant.
That nosebleed trajectory has since proven unstemmable. The last few years have also taken in Oscar, Bafta and Emmy nominations, an Olivier Award-winning performance in a role made famous by Marlon Brando, a dance for Mick Jagger, a TV debut that became a lockdown hit and a major role in the best British film of 2024. His screen career may have started with a sausage, but it soon became a near-unbroken string of bangers.
The man behind the last of these was Andrew Haigh, in whose pricklingly gorgeous romantic drama-slash-ghost story All of Us Strangers Mescal appeared opposite Andrew Scott. Like many, Haigh became aware of him through the 2020 Sally Rooney adaptation Normal People, which the BBC launched on iPlayer about a month into Covid.
Mescal played Connell, a popular high-schooler (and later student) who embarks on a relationship with a classmate, Marianne, played by Daisy Edgar-Jones. Watched by millions at the height of social distancing, the show’s quivery intimacy struck an especially resonant chord.
But sex alone didn’t make it a sensation. Mescal was so striking in the series, Haigh explains, “because of his vulnerability on screen. It’s something that male actors often resist, but Paul is never afraid to show it and that’s why you fall in love with him all the more.”
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Advertise with NZME.That was the quality Haigh wanted to harness in his film, specifically for the scene in which Mescal and Scott’s characters meet. “Paul turns up at Andrew’s door and has to play this strange mix of desperation, fear, lust and drunkenness – which is a very, very hard mix to get right without being off-putting. But the way Paul did it, it’s the opposite: he makes that combination a way of drawing you in.”
Normal People’s mid-Covid launch might have done wonders for Mescal’s profile, but it also perked up his love life. Among its better-known fans was the American singer-songwriter Phoebe Bridgers, who tweeted that the show had left her “sad and horny”. Mescal replied and, for the next two years, they were officially an item.
Yet the pandemic also made his first brush with fame a profoundly unusual one. At the height of Normal People’s popularity, he was cast by the filmmaking duo Luke Taylor and Chris Barrett in their music video for the Rolling Stones’ Scarlet – and that shoot gave him the first work he’d had outside his east London flat in months.
“Paul had moved from Ireland to London to live with some Irish friends,” Barrett recalls, “and they all went home the day before lockdown. So there he was, living by himself in a flat in Hackney, while becoming the world’s most famous person.”
The Normal People publicity tour had been nothing but Zoom interviews from his sofa: no receptions or photo calls, no chicken-based viral videos, no special Q&A screenings at Bafta’s Los Angeles outpost in front of potential employers.
“So he was very happy to be able to get back out and talk to people in person, even if we were all wearing masks on set,” Taylor adds.
The video was shot in a deserted Claridge’s hotel, with Mescal as a young actor who returns to his suite from an awards show a little drunk and emotional and records a series of video messages to a still-beloved ex.
“It all ended up feeling weirdly prescient,” Barrett observes, pointing out that Mescal had not only won a British Academy Television Award for Normal People within the year but that the numerous Brando-channelling shots of him in a vest prefigured his starring role in the 2022 West End revival of A Streetcar Named Desire, for which he nabbed an Olivier Award.
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Advertise with NZME.“We cast him because you could easily imagine him being that kind of once-a-generation star who has that physicality but also that emotional openness,” Barrett explains. “Now, he wasn’t actually that star at the time. But with everything that’s happened since, it’s like the video somehow manifested it.”
The tipping point came just after noon on a sunny Saturday in May 2022. In the foyer of the Grey D’Albion in Cannes, a young man with a thin moustache and broad grin strode out of the lift, dressed in a roomy Prince of Wales check suit. Mescal was en route to the premiere of a small British film he was starring in called Aftersun, scheduled at the decidedly unprestigious time of 12.15pm in a hotel at the far end of the Boulevard de la Croisette.
As he walked to his car, no one took much notice. But later, as the end credits rolled and he bashfully took to the stage with the film’s director, Charlotte Wells, and his 12-year-old co-star Frankie Corio, there was a sense in the room that, during the intervening 101 minutes, something had changed. Who exactly were we now looking at?
The youngest Best Actor Oscar nominee in five years, for a start. Aftersun was a considerable critical and (for its size and theme) commercial hit but it was the ache and glow of Mescal’s performance as a single father at a crossroads that magnetised voters. Not just at the Oscars, either, but the Baftas, British Independent Film Awards and Independent Spirit Awards: that season Mescal was everywhere and, while he may not have won much, an outright victory would have only blinged out a lily that was already sufficiently gilded.
“The thing about Paul is that he neither needs nor wants to be a superstar,” Haigh explains. “Even if he’s now actually becoming one, it isn’t what interests or motivates him.”
Take the decision to play a gay character in All of Us Strangers, something many cinema-goers would assume would now be entirely unremarkable.
“I think actors are still hung up on it,” Haigh says. “In fact, I know they are. I know there were people who wouldn’t necessarily want that role because they wouldn’t want to be seen being intimate with another man. But Paul had absolutely no hang-ups about it at all. We talked about it a lot and there was never any fear or trepidation on his part. He just wanted to make sure that it felt real and true and honest. And that’s why I think those scenes look and feel so good – because his character is fearless in that moment and Paul knew he had to be fearless too.”
During the shoot, Haigh knew that Mescal had been offered Gladiator II and they spoke about the role that Hollywood might play in his future. “You can be sure that, after that Aftersun Oscar season, Paul has been offered every single script that contains a male character in his 20s,” he laughs.
It also seems highly likely that the major franchises came calling. Yet to date, no Jurassic Park or Marvel adventure has appeared on his dance card.
“The choices he’s making are all deeply considered,” Haigh enthuses. His first blockbuster could have been anything, for instance – but it’s a Ridley Scott-directed Roman epic. And he already has two further features banked: Oliver Hermanus’s folk-music romance The History of Sound and Chloe Zhao’s adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet, in which he plays a young William Shakespeare.
Additionally, he’s one year into Richard Linklater’s two-decade-spanning adaptation of the Stephen Sondheim musical Merrily We Roll Along, which he’ll complete in his late 40s. Does Haigh have any career advice? “I mean, he could probably take a rest every now and then. But otherwise no.”
The biggest twist is that Mescal has pulled this off without the obligatory years-long slog around the Hollywood audition circuit. He spent five months in Los Angeles between the filming and release of Aftersun, having also completed a small but pivotal supporting role in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Lost Daughter, opposite Olivia Colman.
But he was renting in the leafy hipster enclave of Highland Park, about an hour’s drive from the action, and arranged a grand total of one meeting with a major studio in his entire time there. Fortunately for him, it was a preliminary chat with Paramount about auditioning for Gladiator II.
He seems far happier in London, where during Streetcar’s initial six-week run at the Almeida in Islington, he became a regular sight at the Old Queen’s Head, a short stroll from the theatre. Rumour was that any female fans so minded had a reasonable chance of being invited back to his digs at closing time, with a croissant from Gail’s in the morning to sweeten the deal.
Then came the tales on TikTok of morning-after strolls in the park – always third-hand, but always assiduously vouched-for – during which Mescal would supposedly always remember a pressing appointment and make his excuses. He laughingly described those stories as “categorically untrue” in a recent interview with GQ – but even so, it’s striking just how normal his social life sounds. When was the last time you heard of a movie star charming prospective dates in the pub?
Beneath the sweetness and novelty of this lies something important: it evidently matters to Mescal that he, his characters and his audience all live in the same world. In interviews, he sometimes talks about his dread of losing touch or succumbing to celebrity moral self-regard.
“My political identity isn’t the thing that people are coming to watch,” he told the broadcaster Louis Theroux on a recent podcast. “I don’t believe in being an innately moralistic force in society as an actor. I think we have a job to be an artist and my moral identity is a private thing to me.”
After Gladiator II, Mescal’s privacy will be harder to cling to. But his current relationship with fame has a playful, even tongue-in-cheek quality that makes you think he just might be able to do it. Take his fondness for short shorts – rigorously chronicled on social media – which his Normal People character Connell regularly wore on the Gaelic football pitch. (Mescal played the sport himself competitively for a spell but retired at 21 after fracturing his jaw in a tackle.)
These appearances conferred such sex appeal on the humble polyester garment that the Italian fashion house Gucci soon rustled up a £500 ($1085) designer version – and lo, this summer, Mescal was photographed at Milan Fashion Week, flashing his estimable thighs on the brand’s behalf. His face was admirably straight but his hands-in-pockets posture said it all: if stardom was to be inescapable, it would also be on his resolutely normal-person terms.
Gladiator II will be released in New Zealand cinemas on November 14.
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