If you want to know who Paul Mescal really is, you have a problem.

If you want to understand why he makes the decisions that Paul Mescal makes (advertising Irish sausages while he was studying acting to pay a year’s rent doesn’t count), you have a problem.

And if you want to know what the sandwich Paul Mescal is eating at this very moment when you are reading these lines, you face an even bigger problem. (Spoiler: he doesn’t understand your obsession and thinks you shouldn’t care.)

Paul Mescal doesn’t want you to understand him. He wants you to see his movies, to go see him at the theater. And, basically, leave him alone.

I need to make a small flashback so you can understand all this. I have to travel back in time with you at 11:00 p.m. on Saturday, May 6, 2023. I find it more interesting than telling you that Mescal is going to bring Shakespeare to life in Chlóe Zhao’s adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s novel Hamnet or that he is already rehearsing the musical composed by Stephen Sondheim Merrily We Roll Along or that he is fascinated – obsession level – by the singer Mitski, whose albums he listens to over and over once more (and may partly explain, he jokes, his penchant for choosing dramas over comedies). The London night is warm and humid (normal, of course, following four hours of nasty rain, as it only rains in London), when Paul Mescal leaves the Almeida Theater and heads towards the Groucho Club, in the heart of London’s SoHo, the adrenaline from the last function A Streetcar Named Desire still crackling throughout his body, brain at 300 kilometers per hour. The company celebrates there the end point of six consecutive weeks on the bill and shelves a version with which critics have poured out condescending praise towards Mescal: Despite his success and his projection, the boy points out ways as an actorthey come to say (Ahemsaying so) the majority of serious reviews from reference media in the theater scene.

Courtesy Almeida Theater

In a scene of A Streetcar Named Desire, Stanley, the character that Mescal has just shed like a snake’s skin that is regarding to shed, says: “There are men who can be fooled with this fable of Hollywood-style fascination and others who cannot.” Blanche replies at that moment: “I’m sure you belong to that second category.” “That’s right,” replies (always contradictory) Stanley. That text in the mouth of that actor at that moment is doubly ironic: it is a declaration of intentions, but it is also a warning of what is to come when, with Gladiator 2, The Irish actor’s career takes on a new dimension in the eyes of the public. Because something else, very different, is the dimension that he wants to continue giving it.

While studying theater at the Lir Academy in Dublin, a teacher he had been working with for some time told Mescal that he was cut out to play Mitch, not Stanley. But the actor wanted to play Stanley at all costs. He was more interested in giving life to a cliff of nightmares and fears than to a sensitive, but predictable, flat character. So on May 6, 2023, Mescal, following leaving the Almeida, at 11:00 p.m., had fulfilled a dream: he might have chosen anything, but he had chosen to return to the theater to play the role for which a teacher did not see him. .

“We live in a world where people are always trying to get you to reveal things regarding your private life”

That moment, we continue with the time jumpis a real turning point for the 28-year-old actor who had a promising future in Gaelic football, a hybrid between rugby and traditional football (the same one his character, Connell, plays in Normal people). Right in front of Groucho’s discreet entrance, the historic gay sex shop Prowler advertises a 24-hour non-stop Roman bacchanal spa with a huge sign. Around the corner, a franchise of the historic gay fetish shop Clone Zone welcomes Londoners wandering around SoHo with a not-so-discreet sign for a small party to which no, you’re not invited, but look how well it goes. They’re having it with leather, feline ears and silicone prosthetics. The street is packed with humans looking for any kind of Saturday night fun. A Sushi bento chain housed in a place that deserved much better and where Calum and Sophie, the characters from After sun, languishes on the verge of closing at the other end. Parked on the street, right on the edge of the club’s door, white vans without fenders and with dirty metal plates and with ephemeral graffiti made with a finger are dozing. Paul Mescal enters with adolescent determination into the exclusive venue reserved for creative minds passing through London. At that particular moment, entering the door of the Groucho Club, Mescal needed to distance himself from all the attention, in the midst of all the noise. Just at that moment he needed to take a ‘break’ following the exhibition of the series Normal peoplefrom the Oscar nomination for After sun (no, he didn’t win) and the (emotionally) demanding filming of Intruder y Unknown (the holidays would arrive shortly in the form of a strike by Hollywood screenwriters and actors). He needed to catch his breath.

Pip/Searchlight Pictures

He is the Paul Mescal who in the summer of 2022 had filmed a film that premieres now, on February 23, Unknown (All of us, strangers), which adapts a novel that doesn’t even reach ankle height. He is the Paul Mescal who in January of that same year had filmed Intrudera science fiction film with Saoirse Ronan that was released in early 2024 and that sleeps the sleep of the just following a direct premiere on Amazon Prime Video (which is inversely proportional to the quality of the film and the performances of the actors). two protagonists).

He is also (and above all) the Paul Mescal pre-Gladiator 2, a film that at that moment has not yet started filming, so, for the moment, Lucio is only in his head, he is not yet in his body. And he is Gucci’s pre-campaign Paul Mescal. That Paul Mescal of May 2023 no longer exists, even if there are photos, even if there are movies. Fast forward to January 2024.

“We live in a world where people are always trying to get you to reveal things regarding your private life. One of the only safe spaces there is, if I’m honest, is when I play a character. That’s because no one can know. never what the truth is,” Paul Mescal (28 years old) tells us exactly two days following filming the last scene of Gladiator 2. He is aware of the degree of exposure he will be subjected to as soon as the film is released. She knows what this is all regarding. The success of the series Normal people In a matter of days in 2020, he managed to turn Mescal into a internet boyfriend without the effort that it took, I don’t know, for Keanu Reeves. Released in a pandemic, it exposed the new actor to exorbitant attention, which, of course, boosted his career, but also generated attention that he neither sought nor wanted. “Who cares what sandwich I’m eating?” It is a complaint of the actor that since then appears in his interviews as a Guadiana topic.

“One of the most dangerous things that can happen to an actor is to isolate himself from the world”

“I think one of the few things you can keep private as an actor, and it’s one of the things I like the most, is that people can never know (should never know) what part comes out of me, what part I’m using what I am, what I have experienced, and what part I have completely manufactured for the character,” continues the Irish actor, sitting on the edge of an armchair that is too low for someone who moves so much when he speaks. This degree of sincerity of the actor with us will have nothing to do with the circus (wink, wink, nudge, nudge) of the Gladiator that is coming, so we continue pulling the thread. We mightn’t care less regarding the peplum.

Her filming partner in IntruderIrish actress Saoirse Ronan said while promoting that film that “when it’s inside [de la historia que se está contando], is within. It becomes her whole world. But at the same time, Paul never disappears.” You have to see Intruder to understand what Saoirse is saying.

“I’m never going to tell anyone what part of me is in the characters. It’s part of the magic of acting,” he says. It’s her secret. It’s your truth.

Dave Bennett

Paul Mescal and Andrew Scott, at the 2024 BAFTA Awards party.

It’s like the movie he’s now promoting, Unknowna drama regarding grief and the difficulty of loving disguised as a ghost movie in which the least important thing is what is real and what are visions.

“It’s one of those types of films in which if you try to find a physical meaning, you lose the meaning of the film. It’s one of those types of films that always address the most intelligent person in the audience. If someone is looking for a meaning or a meaning and it’s not looking for feeling, what is this movie really trying to say, it’s missing its goal. Open the door, let the love, the feeling in. Don’t look for a rational meaning. Because you’re going to lose. You can’t win as an audience if you’re looking for meaning.” The same as if you try to understand who Mescal is and you miss the interpretation.

Furthermore, it is clear that the Paul Mescal in front of me has absolutely nothing to do with the Paul Mescal who filmed in 2021 After sun or that in 2022 he recorded Intruder y Unknown and began rehearsals A Streetcar Named Desire and to whom they began to feel out Gladiator 2 (the call came when he was filming Unknown).

Jay L. Clendenin

“One of the worst things that can happen to an actor, one of the most dangerous things that can happen to him when he is under public scrutiny is to isolate himself, to start disappearing from the world… You have to change. If you don’t change… The world can scary, but if you get scared and retreat you can’t experience life, how are you going to do it? If you’re not in the world living, evolving, changing, making mistakes, I think your work is going to suffer,” Mescal acknowledges. .

“I feel like making movies that are bigger [como Gladiator 2] and carrying the responsibility of directing a film like that of course changes you, but I also think that, in the end, you apply these same principles,” he continues.

Do you know something? Mescal might have played Mitch exactly the same as Stanley. He is one of those types of actors who, with the makings of protagonists, know how to sharpen a well-constructed supporting role. “Your job when you play a supporting role is to understand the role that the main actor has, because you have to understand very well where you fit into that story, into their story, which is not your story. You have to know what intersection you enter,” Mescal tells me.

When I tell him my theory (Mitch-Stanley exchange), Mescal laughs. I try to refute his laughter, telling him that in Unknown He might also very well have played the role of Andrew Scott and vice versa. I know I’m right… Mescal rubs his left arm with his right hand, slowly, up and down, and answers: “What I really feel is that Andrew might have played the role Claire Foy plays.” I’m regarding to tell him that he might have done it too, but time is running out for the interview.

Pip/Searchlight Pictures

*This interview appears in the March issue of Esquire

* You can watch the full miniseries Normal People on Movistar +. Have Foe (Intruder) on Amazon Prime Video. After sun It is for rent on Filmin. The dark daughter it’s on netflix