If you scroll down the short list of people who are having a great 2020, somewhere in between “unscrupulous tech billionaires” and “babies, who have no idea what's happening in the world,” you'll find Paul Mescal.
Mescalmania first took hold as April turned into May and we were, by then, fully entrenched in the reality of a global catastrophe. As we were shut in our homes for weeks on end with limited human contact, the prevailing mood was “sad,” trailed closely by “horny.” Then along came Normal People, a show that was profoundly, excessively both. Adapted from the wildly popular novel of the same name by Sally Rooney, the BBC and Hulu series follows the on-again, off-again relationship between two Irish millennials named Connell (Mescal) and Marianne (Daisy Edgar-Jones) during their final year of high school and throughout college. Over the course of 12 episodes, there's abundant, well-lit sex, a fair amount of crying, and an intensifying sense that you're witnessing the making of a leading man, one who will be appearing on our screens for years and years to come.
It's all the more impressive when you realize this is Mescal's television debut. He embodies Connell, an erudite and sensitive jock from a working-class family, so thoroughly as to be uncanny: Rooney, who is also an executive producer and writer on the show, even told the actor that he was exactly who she was imagining when she wrote the book. Audiences were captivated, and Normal People catapulted the 24-year-old from unknown Irish lad to international sensation in the span of a binge watch. The breadth of the phenomenon is such that Mescal is both the subject of teenagers fawning “i want paul mescal to crush me with his thighs” on Twitter and esteemed author Lorrie Moore writing that he “strongly resembles Michelangelo's David” in The New York Review of Books. More than 185,000 people, including several adults I know, now follow an Instagram account that is solely devoted to posting photos of Connell's chain necklace.
Part of this can be chalked up to his palpable movie-star magnetism, the kind that makes you picture an old-timey studio exec chomping on a cigar and barking, “Either you have it or you don't, kid.” (He has it.) Lenny Abrahamson, who directed six episodes of Normal People, ventures a guess that Mescal's appeal stems from his specific brand of masculinity. “You can see phases in the movie industry where leading men were very broad-chested, big and strong. And then you can see phases where they became slighter and more delicate. Paul is an interesting combination,” Abrahamson tells me. “I think what people fell in love with was that beautiful combination of sensitivity and power. It's such an unusual combination.”
When Mescal and I talk one afternoon in late August, he's wearing a plain white T-shirt and chugging a can of Coke as his Zoom flickers on. Based on my limited view of his space—a gray couch against an unadorned wall—I can confirm that his interior-decor scheme is 24-Year-Old Guy's Apartment. (He shares his London flat with a roommate, the actress India Mullen, whom he befriended when she played Peggy on Normal People.) “It's weird. I know that when I look back, I'll remember COVID and how awful this year has been generally,” he tells me. “But then, personally? It's been pretty, pretty good.”
How good? In the lead-up to Normal People, he signed with a big-league Hollywood agency. (CAA.) Afterward he nabbed a best-lead-actor Emmy nomination for, again, his first television role ever. (“So beyond thrilled.”) Followed that up by starring in a music video for a little-known band called the Rolling Stones. (“So fun.”) Then topped it all off by being cast in his first feature film, alongside Olivia Colman and Dakota Johnson in Maggie Gyllenhaal's The Lost Daughter, another literary adaptation of a work by a lauded contemporary writer—this time, Elena Ferrante. (“Absolutely surreal.”) So yeah. Pretty, pretty good.
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The realization that he was suddenly famous came to Mescal while he was indoors and scrolling through his phone as a newcomer to a city he had moved to just before it went into lockdown. “Maybe it's just my algorithm on Twitter, but it seemed like my demographic was kind of going mad for the show,” he says. “And that was a moment for a big exhale and ‘Okay. Thank God people don't hate it. In fact, people kind of like it a lot.’ ” Since that big exhale, he's been spending his time reading incoming scripts, boxing, and appeasing the press demands that come with being the year's hot new breakout. (When we talk there seems to be a slight undercurrent of Zoom fatigue.) Then, as Europe began to reopen in July, he ventured back out into the world and got a tangible grasp of just how much everything had really changed for him.
Abrahamson recalls catching up with Mescal in Ireland after the show premiered and seeing people “coming out of pubs and houses” when they realized the actor was among them. “That's very un-Irish. Irish people pride themselves on not bothering famous people,” says Abrahamson. “It was a bit like some kind of zombie apocalypse, with people walking towards the prize with their arms outstretched.”
Although Mescal looks like he sprang fully formed from Sally Rooney's head, he grew up the eldest of three children in a small town in County Kildare and had what he calls a “pretty wonderfully normal” childhood. “I was good in school. I didn't particularly like getting in trouble. I wasn't particularly rebellious,” Mescal says. “I think I may have spoiled it for my younger siblings.” Mom worked as a garda, or police officer, while Dad was an elementary school teacher—and yes, they've both seen Normal People. “They love it,” Mescal says. “Probably a bit weird seeing their son or whatever naked, but they got over that quickly.”
Mescal's muscular thighs, a topic that is discussed frequently and with great enthusiasm by his fandom, were built playing Gaelic football. Defense, specifically. “I was definitely not the most skilled,” he tells me. “I was good at getting in the way of people, annoying people, throwing my body around. I was quite diligent. I trained and I worked really hard because I didn't have the skill set that other people possessed.”
Brendan Hackett, his old football coach, remembers it differently. “I would say he is being humble there, in my opinion,” he says. A good Gaelic football player, Hackett explains, has to possess four qualities: physical fitness, mental fitness, technical ability, and tactical awareness. “I would say that Paul had a balance right across the four areas, which is very unusual to come across,” he says. “Very mature and very grounded.” Abrahamson, too, singles out Mescal's “maturity” as the one word that comes to mind: “Given somebody who is very young and hadn't been on set before, he was neither intimidated nor was he cocky,” he says. Despite Mescal's age, this does not manifest onscreen as precociousness but as a sense of ease and self-possession.
As a teenager, Mescal always thought that he would pursue a practical career path—law, for instance—that would allow him to play Gaelic football on the side. Then, at 16, he had his first experience on the stage, as the Phantom in a high school production of The Phantom of the Opera. “I've never gotten a buzz or a high like that ever in my life,” he told me earlier this year. “I'd been chasing that to some degree.” The closer he got to making his original plan a reality, the less he wanted it. And so he applied and got in to the Lir Academy at Trinity College, in Dublin, where, for a while, he tried to juggle both acting and football. (A broken jaw sustained during a match made him realize the latter wasn't compatible with the former.) Postcollege, he starred in a couple of plays, including a production of The Great Gatsby, before vaulting to Normal People.
When a gifted young actor shows up seemingly out of nowhere, there can be a sense that they possess an inexplicable talent. Mescal understands this but, as with football, credits his practice. “I know for a fact that if I hadn't gone to drama school or if I hadn't worked in the theater for two years, I wouldn't have been able to do the job that I wanted to do on Normal People,” he says.
After the show was released, he watched it all the way through once and then “put it to bed.” But that's not to say that he's done with Connell by any means. “For as long as I get to act, I will feel very attached to him,” he says. (The main differences between him and Connell, by the way, are “how emotionally unavailable” and “how unsure and insecure” the character is.)
And he is, for better or worse, intertwined with Connell in the public eye while he adjusts to his newfound level of fame. His Normal People costar Daisy Edgar-Jones tells me in an email that she and Mescal “are both still so in the midst of processing it, as now we are able to leave the house and see the change in real life, not just online.”
I wonder if Normal People would have resonated to the extent that it did if it hadn't entered the ether during the early days of coronavirus isolation, and I pose the question to Mescal. “I think there would have been an appetite for the show, pandemic or no pandemic, but it has definitely brought an audience to it faster than it would in ordinary circumstances,” he concedes. Lord knows that Rooney's book has its own cottage industry of discourse at this point, but the fact that it had such mass appeal with, well, normal people probably guaranteed the adaptation some measure of success. Throw in two extraordinary young leads, honest depictions of intimacy, and a global pandemic keeping everyone glued to their television and laptop screen, and you've got all the trappings of a hit.
“The fandom on the show has been amazing, and seeing people have articulate discussions about character is so satisfying,” says Mescal, who notes that “99 percent” of his interactions with fans have been “really positive.” And that's not even mentioning the praise he's received from veteran actors, from Hugh Jackman to Richard E. Grant.
Some aspects of celebrity are a bit stranger. Getting photographed wearing short shorts on the way back from the corner shop, for instance. Or going for a jog. Or simply walking down the street looking at his phone. “I just find the whole thing a little bit toxic,” he says of the paparazzi. He underwent his first round of relationship speculation in the tabloids this summer, when reports emerged that he and the indie musician Phoebe Bridgers ate breakfast together in Ireland. (He declined to talk about the particulars.) And how does he feel about Connell's chain—the chain that launched a thousand posts and think pieces and shopping guides?
“It wasn't something that we put any focus on during filming. I think there has been a kind of leaning on the sexualizing of it, which has been a little bit difficult to adjust to,” Mescal says. “I don't really have a response to it, because I don't know what to say other than it's a chain, and it's a chain that's referenced in the book, and it's a chain that Connell wears. It's not something I lie in bed thinking about at night.” (Mescal did seize on the momentum and raffle off his own, similar chain, raising 70,000 euros for a suicide-prevention organization in Ireland. He gave Edgar-Jones the original from the show as a gift.)
The attention swirling around the chain does get at something deeper: the reality of coming to prominence in the middle of an era when over-the-top male objectification is par for the course. I ask if it bothers him. “Honest answer? Yes,” he tells me. “It's not something that I try to lean into. But I put it down to the audience's associations with Connell rather than with me.”
He is quick to say that, of course, he is not ambivalent about his fame. That he feels “totally privileged” to be in the position that he's in. He is, after all, having a great year. One of the best, even. And if anyone didn't expect it to all happen so quickly for Paul Mescal, it was Paul Mescal.
“To be thrust into the spotlight in a time when everyone's living in these really stressful environments of fucking COVID and trying to survive…” He takes a deep sigh. “It's just been the most adrenaline-fueled, stressful, exciting time of my life.”
Gabriella Paiella is a GQ staff writer.
A version of this story originally appears in the November 2020 issue with the title "Everybody Has a Crush on Paul Mescal."
PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographs by Alasdair McLellan
Styled by Ellie Grace Cumming
Grooming by Joe Mills using Joe Mills x Primark
Tailoring by Holly Harris for Karen Avenell
Produced by Ragi Dholakia Productions
Special thanks to Epping Forest, London
