A beige T-shirt pockmarked with holes, gently mussed bedhead, sheepish smile: This is Paul Mescal’s ordinary-guy armor. Since catapulting to fame in the pandemic-era sensation Normal People, the Irish actor has cornered the market for approachable-looking characters with tortured souls. His characters seem to leak emotion through their pores. In projects like that Sally Rooney adaptation and the movie Aftersun (which nabbed him an Oscar nomination), he gives us male suffering so delicate it feels like grace. We don’t just watch Mescal; we ache for him.
Mescal is currently rehearsing for his upcoming role as Paul McCartney in Sam Mendes’s Beatles movies while also promoting Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet, an emotionally devastating portrait of Shakespeare and his family. Mescal, of course, plays the Bard. “I think a little break from playing very well-known and revered artists is on the cards,” he says, flashing a smile.
Shoes by Gucci; socks by Pantherella.
Photographer Theo Wenner. Fashion Editor Tom Guinness.
Photographer Theo Wenner. Fashion Editor Tom Guinness.
Preparing for Hamnet plunged Mescal and costar Jessie Buckley into “dream work,” a creative process so intense and poetic, he can barely explain it. “It just opened up the bottom of everything before we even started, so it felt like we were walking around exposed the whole time. It allowed me and Jessie to skip about 15 years of knowing each other,” he says. “I was like: This is a person for life now.”
He hopes to eventually move past characters who radiate varying degrees of sadness—even if those magnetically melancholy figures have earned him a fervent following. “I don’t know if I’ll have more to say with roles like Will or Lionel or Connell or Harry,” Mescal says, naming his characters in Hamnet, The History of Sound, Normal People, and All of Us Strangers. “I recognize that they are in conversation with each other, and there’s obviously some sort of artistic compulsion that I feel to be in that territory. And I don’t know if I’m finished with that yet, but I might be finished with that?”
Not that he regrets any of it. “The things that I’ve made were the only things that I could make at that moment,” says Mescal. “And as long as that stays true, then I don’t feel like I need to get into the concept of planning a career, or planning what I think an audience wants for me. If you’re making career decisions with an audience in mind, you’re…fucked. I’d walk onto set and have a panic attack if that was what I started doing.”
