Paul Mescal on History of Sound, Hamnet, and Playing Paul McCartney

I
have a sneaking suspicion that everybody wants to be in a musical,” says Paul Mescal without a hint of irony, reaching into an off-license refrigerator and pulling out a pink G&T in a can. “Should we get a cold one of these?” He grabs two then saunters up to the till for a pack of Marlboro Golds and a cheap plastic lighter. When I move to pay, he boxes me out of the way with a cheerful, “Naaaaaaaahhhh.” He tried to quit smoking recently, he says, went about six weeks, then caved. “Oh, I was just out with friends,” he explains of the backslide. “It’s not insidious. I’m not smoking for insidious reasons.”

In fact, between the time that Mescal had shown up (promptly) at our appointed meeting spot across from a pub called the Famous Cock (“Ha! It’s pretty identifiable, isn’t it?”) and the time an hour or so later when he’d guilelessly announced that everybody — everybody? — wants to be in a musical, “insidious” is the last word one might associate with the man. Walking the path around London’s Highbury Fields with a little spring in his step — sunglasses on, mullet tousled, Adidas track pants tucked into his white ​​athletic socks — he’d nodded at elderly gentlemen and playfully skirted strollers and passed himself off as the most well-­adjusted of movie stars. “I love babies with very adult names,” he said at one point. “I would love to have a family. I’m not like, ‘I want them tomorrow,’ but I would love to have kids.”

Other things he loves include, but are certainly not limited to, his “lucky” childhood, summer in London, the Islington neighborhood (“This is where my brother and sister are. I love it here”), drinking in the park, walking around parks, parks in general, sports, musicals, music “with a context,” Irish music, folk music, the Beatles, playing music, music in general, his dad, his mom, Ridley Scott, Andrew Scott (“If God was a real person, I think he would be something like an Andrew Scott”), all his other co-stars, the characters played by his co-stars, the characters played by him opposite those co-stars, Paul McCartney (“I’ve met him a couple of times. I adore him. I think he changed the world”), and his current job rehearsing to play Paul McCartney in the four Sam Mendes biopics that are slated to be released in 2028: “It’s a version of a weird 9-to-5, and I thought I would hate that and I actually am loving that. I do like structure a lot. I like a plan. I like rehearsals.” 

Editor’s picks

All of which is to say that, on first impression, it’s pretty hard to square Mescal with his so-called oeuvre, a body of work in which emotional devastation is both through line and common denominator. To date, has any actor paralleled Mescal’s uncanny skill for unrequited longing, sidelong glances, and heaving sobs? Has one man ever ugly-cried so gorgeously and across such a pantheon of sad and gorgeous films? Sure, acting is acting and all that. Actors don’t have to share emotions with the characters they portray. But really, have you seen the man onscreen?

---

Watch the video interview below

---

Take his breakout role as Connell Waldron in Normal People, in which he became, overnight, the poster boy of sad boyfriends the world over, his beautiful brooding and misty moping so palpable that even the inanimate objects around him took on a sort of hallowed meaning (the Instagram account devoted to the chain he wore around his neck on the show has 124K followers, among whom, I promise, are people you know). Or his role as a depressed dad in Aftersun, for which he was nominated for an Academy Award for thoroughly breaking the heart of every viewer. Or his turn as an even sadder boyfriend in All of Us Strangers, which — no, actually, don’t even get me started or I’ll burst into tears right here and now. Even in a blockbuster like Gladiator II — even then! — Mescal was not content simply to flash his muscled thighs while spouting bombasticisms about honor and glory and the perfidy of Rome. Nope. He had to make us feel the vulnerability, the inner torment of Lucius Verus Aurelius. Damn him, he had to make us feel. 

Related Content

And now, oh God, he’s talking in that friendly, easygoing way about his two new films, The History of Sound (in theaters) and Hamnet (out Nov. 27), which might jointly be his saddest and most poignant yet, if it were possible to crank the knob up to 11. The former, a historical drama about an ill-fated love affair between two men recording rural folk music before the songs are forever lost to time (double sob), premiered at Cannes to a six-minute standing ovation. The latter, based on a novel by Maggie O’Farrell about the Shakespeare family’s all-encompassing grief over the loss of their young son, is such a weeper that when I attended an early press screening in New York, a kindly security guard made the rounds with a box of Kleenex after the movie ended, doling out tissues to viewers while they gathered up their tote bags and their psyches as the credits rolled. Suffice to say, it makes for a bit of a head-scratcher to now see Mescal laughing at the dachshund and the poodle vigorously humping on the grass (“They’re having a great time!”) and seeming, himself, to be having a great time while talking pleasantly about the profound brokenness of so many of his characters and his attraction to that brokenness and also how he must, at some level, share it. “I do feel like I understand it,” he says, as the sun dimples merrily through the trees. “And that must mean that there’s part of that in me.”

Which is a damn tantalizing thing to say on a summer-evening stroll, and perhaps he might want to dig into that a little?

Mescal scratches his mullet. He removes the headphones from around his neck and swings them around the cord like a fan. “I don’t see my life as a comedy, you know what I mean? It’s like, I don’t think I’m fucking living in a fucking tragedy, but I think I’m predisposed to …” He trails off. More vigorous swinging of headphones occurs. “I don’t know. I think I just live …” More swinging still. “Maybe if there was a graph, I would live closer to drama than I do comedy?”

He shuffles over to the other side of the path. He shuffles back. He shuffles away again.

“Yeah, I don’t feel bad,” he says finally. “I think what I would say is it’s very up and down for me. It’s peaks and troughs — sometimes within the same day. I think it’s been kind of like that in my head since I can remember.” More scratching. More swinging. “The thing that I find most exhausting about my brain is I don’t get just, like, ‘Everything’s good.’ It’s either great or it’s bad.”

FROM THE OUTSIDE, it’s easy to see what might be great about being inside the head of Paul Mescal, what with all of the A-list directors clamoring to cast him and the A-list designers clamoring to get his legs in their short-shorts and the adorable videos of him dancing at Glastonbury with his girlfriend, Gracie Abrams, who made the relationship internet-­official with an Instagram post of herself and Mescal lying together all cozy and blissful in the sun. What with all the nominations (Emmy, Oscar) and all the wins (Olivier, BAFTA) and all the critics calling him a “generational talent” and “the next Marlon Brando” and “untainted by vanity or ego.” What with the fact that everyone who ever mentions him seems to fall all over themselves to gush not just over his acting chops but also about the supreme menschiness of the man himself. “Such a genuinely wonderful and sweet and considerate and kind person,” effuses Oliver Hermanus, who directed him in The History of Sound, the first project that Mescal also executive-produced. “It’s actually nauseating to think of nothing unkind to say about Paul. [I just like] knowing that he’s out there.” Plus, Hermanus continues, “he has access to a very full range of emotions and ideas, and he’s really willing to explore them, to touch the live wire.”

“I would call it soulfulness rather than sadness,” says Andrew Scott, who played opposite Mescal in All of Us Strangers and who, like Hermanus, counts him as a close friend. “I think that’s what people can detect in him. He’s got a really deep, beautiful soul, and so of course he’s going to be attracted to things that have deep, deep soul in them.”

“I wasn’t in a great spot last year, psychologically. I found it useful to be on my own.”

“Soulful” is a start when it comes to pinpointing Mescal’s psychological depth, but surely there’s cause to survey the biographical facts as we know them. Mescal, 29, grew up in Maynooth, Ireland, which currently boasts about 17,000 residents and, if Google search serves, is picturesque and placid, an ideal locale for the sort of well-adjusted childhood Mescal maintains he had, LARPing around the glens and dales (“I played with fake swords and fake guns until I was 15 — a little bit too late”) and perfecting BMX moves with his friend Padge. Mom was a cop. Dad was a teacher who’d dabbled in acting himself, though it wasn’t something father and son much discussed. There wasn’t a lot of money, but there was, apparently, a lot of love (“I know his family, and they’re just really, really beautiful people,” confirms Scott; “They’re so close, it’s very enviable to be around the Mescals,” corroborates Hermanus). Of course his younger brother and sister adored him. Of course he got good grades. Of course he was good at sports, first hurling and then, later on, Gaelic football. Of course he stayed out of trouble. Of course the one time he didn’t stay out of trouble, talking back at school and landing himself in detention, he regretted it almost immediately (“I felt thrilled at the concept of being in detention. I thought I was badass. And then, when I was in detention, I was like, ‘This is so fucking boring.’ Never got detention again”).

Naturally, there were adolescent woes, but likely only of the garden-variety. Mescal was somewhat shy and bashful, embarrassed of his big hands and the awkwardness of growing into his powerful body. The first time he tried to kiss a girl, he overshot and ended up bonking into her head — mortifying, but probably not a psychic wound. When, at 16, he broke his nose bonking someone else’s head in a football warm-up, he pined for the nose he’d once had, not yet knowing that the new crook would one day make him look Roman enough to cavort about an amphi­theater for the likes of Ridley Scott. This, of course, was beyond imagining. 

Still, Mescal says, “It got pretty Troy Bolton-y in secondary school” when he was cast as the phantom in his high school’s rendition of Phantom of the Opera and realized that the theater offered the same camaraderie and competitiveness as Gaelic football (“The audition was like fucking Lord of the Flies”) minus the violent bonking: “I was like, ‘Oh, this is fully a drug. This is glorious.’ ” 

At the Lir National Academy of Dramatic Art in Dublin, surrounded by kids who’d been doing jazz hands since they were toddlers, Mescal maintains that his doggedness got him through. “I didn’t have the ease of talent that I felt other people had, so it had to come from somewhere else,” he says. “Or, no, I suppose I would argue that the talent that I had then is probably no different to the talent that I have now. But I didn’t feel talented. When I’d see actors in my class who had more experience improvising, for example, or doing things that I had no experience in, I started to panic, because I’d spent a lot of my life up until that point being good at Gaelic football and being like, ‘I know how to be good at this.’ With the acting thing, I loved doing it, but I didn’t know if I was good — and I felt bad at it.”

He considered dropping out until a teacher persuaded him not to. And since he didn’t drop out, he decided that the only option was to “fucking be the best,” which led to a “monk-like” existence and some serious discipline and self-denial. “That was something I could access because of sport, I think — sacrifice,” he says now, settling onto a park bench and lighting one of the Marlboro Golds. “I realized after drama school that that’s not necessarily useful permanently as a creative person. But it was useful for me at that moment in time.”

Anyway, he’s not sure he wants to rehash all of this. “I’m bored of myself in terms of that side of my life,” he says, not unpleasantly. “I can hear myself going, ‘Shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up.’ ” He takes another drag. For a moment, he’s quiet. But then: “I don’t think I was generally in a great spot psychologically last year, and I found it useful to be on my own for that — and also for the films themselves. Kind of a happy accident, I suppose. Not that I would chase that anymore,” he says of the melancholy, the sense of unsettledness that characterized the months when he was shooting The History of Sound and Hamnet. “That has got a sell-by date in terms of being sustainable. I didn’t want it to be there when it was happening, but now that it’s done, I’m glad that I didn’t have to reach for certain things.”

His not needing to reach is part of what makes The History of Sound so haunting. He says that his character loved Josh O’Connor’s character so much that when O’Connor finished filming and left set, Mescal yearned for his presence. When he knew Jessie Buckley — who plays Shakespeare’s wife, Agnes, in Hamnet — was filming a hard scene without him, it was all he could do not to rush to the set to comfort her. “I was a crazy person,” he says of those moments. “I just felt like I wanted to be there, but I also was like, ‘I can’t be there. It would be fucking weird to be there.’ ” Instead, he kept to himself, reading poetry, writing, like Shakespeare might have done. 

“You know that crazy drunk talk where you’re like, ‘Let’s do the fucking thing’? We did.” 

“I think, very much like Shakespeare, Paul expresses parts of him [through his art] that he might not be able to express in real life,” Hamnet director Chloé Zhao tells me. “He’s creating a container for himself and expressing that and allowing himself to feel that. I would not bring an actor who doesn’t have that to play William Shakespeare.”

In fact, when Zhao was first approached about adapting the novel — while driving through the New Mexico desert en route to the 2022 Telluride Film Festival — she balked. “I said no,” Zhao tells me. “I said, ‘I just can’t think of anyone that can play Shakespeare, that level of an archetypal force.’ Then I got to Telluride, and I got a call from my team, and they said, ‘There’s an actor named Paul Mescal who’d like to meet with you.’ I Googled him. I saw his face. I was like, ‘Oh … interesting.’ ” 

While in Colorado, the two met up for a walk, and Zhao found herself studying Mescal’s profile. “I thought, ‘This is somebody who can channel something for me,’ ” she explains. “William Shakespeare’s work, it’s very violent, it’s very dark, it’s very masculine, for better or worse, so I wanted somebody who is not afraid to go to a place that, in today’s climate, might seem toxic or dark. I needed somebody who’s willing to go there.”

As it turned out, both Mescal and Buckley were only too willing to go wherever Zhao led. The two actors had met on the Greek island of Spetses while filming Maggie Gyllenhaal’s 2021 feature debut, The Lost Daughter, and they began hanging out in New York in 2024, when Buckley was shooting Gyllenhaal’s The Bride! and Mescal was working on The History of Sound. A favorite haunt was a place called Joyface in Alphabet City. “Sometimes they’d lock up and let us stay in after, and we’d get to play show tunes on the decks, me and Jessie and Oliver [Hermanus] and Freddie [Hechinger, who co-starred with Mescal in Gladiator II],” says Mescal. “So we were there, both drunk — and it was months before we started filming — and we were both like, ‘Let’s just go in.’ You know that kind of crazy drunk talk where you’re like, ‘Let’s fucking do the thing’? And we followed through. It’s fair to say we are nothing if not committed to the bit.” 

“In every scene, we’d be like, ‘Let’s just get on the roller coaster and see. Whatever you choose to do, I’m with you,’ ” Buckley agrees. “Sometimes there’s a connection and a chemistry and a trust that happens between people on set that gives you permission to go somewhere even more unknowable and deeper than you’ve gone before. And I think Paul is always in pursuit to go to the unknowable place in himself. He’s so unusual because he’s such a giant of a man and a human, and there’s so much sensitivity right below the first layer of his skin, which he lets you see.”

The preparation for Hamnet involved dream work (he began to see dreams as connective, possibly even predictive, “a manifestation of fear, maybe,” and a link from his subconscious to the character). It involved tapping into a sort of primal masculinity that he usually eschews, doing “polarity” work with Buckley in which, Zhao says, “all she had to do was surrender, and all he had to do was contain.” It involved Jungian exercises to, as Zhao puts it, “drop into the collective unconscious” so that he was “truly channeling Shakespeare, not acting out of what we decided he should be.” And it involved opening himself up to a kind of grief he says he’s never personally experienced. “I can’t even contemplate the death of anybody that I love,” he says. “Some people are OK with the concept of death. Some people are zen with it. Truly, I had a conversation with somebody recently, and they spoke so elegantly about their relationship to death, and I fully believe that that is their position — and mine could not be further away from that.”

He also gave up drinking while making the film, though when Zhao suggested that he actually get drunk for a scene in which Shakespeare does so, Mescal agreed. “I hadn’t drank for weeks and then just got absolutely hammered drinking straight fucking bourbon,” he tells me. “Fell asleep. I truly don’t remember a lot of that day.” Buckley laughs deeply when I bring it up. “I have some really good, incriminating pictures on my phone, which will never see the light of day,” she says. “After we did it, he’s like, ‘There’s just no way that scene could be done any other way.’ And then he came in the next day, and he was like, ‘Oh, no, what have I done?’ But he went for it.”

The scene is a pivotal one in the film, the moment when Agnes Shakespeare grows concerned about Will’s mental health. When I ask Mescal what was happening last year that made him “not in a great spot, psychologically,” he doesn’t want to go into specifics. “You become a different person anyway through your twenties,” he demurs. “I just feel like I was innocent in a way that is nice to think of, and kind of sad to feel like I don’t feel innocent like that. Getting what I want has kind of dissolved some of the innocence.”

Or, at the very least, he clarifies, it’s made him scared to lose what he has, protective of that psychological alchemy that he keeps dancing around. “You do something well, and then that’s the bar,” he continues. “And it doesn’t leave a lot of room for perceived failure. The pressure when you step onto set is way scarier now than it would’ve been to me back then, because I didn’t even know what I thought was good.”

Anyway, he says of his melancholy as we make our way back toward the Tube in the dimming evening light, “I was so lucky to be surrounded by people like Oliver and Josh, and Jessie and Chloé, who allowed for that to exist, and ultimately took me out of it.”

“Do people just think I’m crying all the time? I’m not! I hate crying. I don’t like It.”

THE NEXT EVENING, we meet up again, at a small bar Mescal says he frequented when he was playing Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire at the Almeida Theater, a performance that was hailed as “riveting” and “electric” and “ferocious.” The waitress knows him well enough to intuit his drink order (something with scotch, but fruity). “This was my little spot, so don’t blow this up, please,” he says, taking a swig.

The day had been a full one: He’d been up in time to bundle himself into a hired car at 6:45 a.m. for a drive out to the studio where the Beatles cast rehearses. “Average day is: We get up, we go out to Bobbington — which is about an hour and a quarter drive — listening to the Beatles in the car,” he tells me. “Then we go in, and we try to walk, talk, play, think like the Beatles. Then we get in the car, listen to the Beatles, and go home.” In the past, he’s been wary of projects that dragged on, but this one is different: He will be performing live, which means needing to convincingly sound like the most famous living member of, arguably, the most famous and important band in the history of music. Last year, he started learning to play guitar left-handed, which McCartney is and Mescal isn’t. “It would just be crazy to not play it left-handed, you know?” he says of taking on the challenge. “You’re like, ‘Nah. I like [McCartney] a lot, but I don’t love him.’ That would be the messaging if I didn’t play left-handed. And he’s the fucking coolest man on planet Earth, I think.”

The challenge also suits the intensity of his personality. “I don’t think I’m chill, generally,” he says, ruffling his mullet. “When I’m around people that I love and feel safe, I like being silly — it’s a feeling that I don’t get a lot, and I like that — but I think, for the most part, I’m …” He pauses, considering. “Maybe not intense, but slightly obsessive. I’m obsessed with the Beatles at the moment. It’s part of my job, but it’s also the way that my brain is wired. I’m excited about listening to music, writing music, absorbing music, going to shows, all of these things — they start with an intensity with the job and then kind of become my personality for a bit.”

Recently, Mescal tells me, he’s been reading Ian Leslie’s John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs. “He reframes this whole relationship for me,” Mescal says. “We understand it as something that became incredibly antagonistic, which it was for a period, but also it was, to my mind, the greatest creative collaboration that we’ve maybe ever had as human beings — definitely in modern times. He roots it in a kind of love. It’s so moving, so moving. I was crying so much.” He catches himself and grins. “Do people just think I’m crying all the time?” he says, tucking into a second drink that has seemed to materialize in front of him. “I’m not! I hate crying. I don’t like it. I hate it. I couldn’t tell you the time that I cried before last Sunday, for example.”

He declines to go into what made him cry last Sunday: “Just life, but it’s all good though.” And he certainly doesn’t want to talk about his own romantic life. “I don’t know how to answer that,” he says, when I ask if there’s a particular moment or milestone that made him and Abrams decide to take their relationship public. “I actually do have an answer, but everything to do with that is deeply precious to me and I don’t want to.… This isn’t … I don’t really … umm … I want to protect those things fundamentally.”

Instead, he asks if we can go outside to smoke, which he does while slowly pacing along the edge of the narrow street, wearing a white T-shirt from the Cannes Festival. Look, here’s the thing about the crying: People talk about the emotional weight of the movies he’s in, but isn’t it true that most are actually love stories, and tender ones at that? He wants to “go in,” of course. He wants to portray characters like “the men that I love in my life [who] often have this quality of being latently emotional but find the expression of that difficult.” He wants his roles to start important conversations about masculinity and mental health, and he’ll even — sort of — talk about his own: “Thank fuck for therapy. Thank God we have that language to go to somebody to talk about your feelings who doesn’t have any kind of prior knowledge of who you are.” 

But Mescal also wants to make clear that all the darkness and brokenness is in service to something so beautiful, something so true to the human condition. How illuminating to be reminded that Shakespeare was a family man, a husband, a father, a son. How beguiling to think of the Beatles as a love story. What is loss but the measure of love? What is longing but a form of care? And — see — isn’t that the point? That the deepness is his, and it can be great or it can be bad, but it’s deeply, deeply precious to him — the mysterious alchemy, the very thing that must be protected. “It’s very hard to retain any kind of mystery,” he says. “And I think out of the art forms, [acting] is the one that’s most critical for that.”

Back inside the bar, Mescal orders another round. The small room has begun to fill (“The finance bros are in,” Mescal says, grinning. “Let’s go, boys!”). A three-piece band has set up along one wall — a woman playing an upright bass leading a guy on electric guitar and another guy with a small drum kit. 

“That’s a Beatles song!” Mescal announces suddenly, four notes into a new number. “Duh-duh-duh-duh,” he sings, his face having gone beatific. “Do you know what’s crazy is, most people here might recognize the song, but they might not know it’s a Beatles song. It’s ‘And I Love Her’! It’s a Paul-John song! I’ll give you her, and I love herrrrrrrr.”

Mescal swivels around, eyes bright on the band. “See the way they’re finding shit now,” he leans back to tell me, motioning toward the instruments. “They’re transitioning, and he’s just watching her hands — see? He’s watching her hands. He’s just figuring out what the chord is.” There’s something rapturous in the nod of Mescal’s head. “I would love to be able to play music like that.”

How many drinks have we had now? Three? Four? The room is heady with the heat and the crowd and the strings and the snare and somehow now we’re talking about Merrily We Roll Along, the Steven Sondheim musical that Richard Linklater is adapting with Mescal in snippets over the next 20 years. “I love Sondheim more than I love musical theater,” Mescal practically sighs. “Sondheim, Shakespeare, and the Beatles. Genius!”

He fumbles around on his phone. “What’s the John Wilkes Booth song?” Finally, he pulls up the soundtrack to Sondheim’s Assassins — a musical of the very darkest genius — and we bow our heads over the little speaker, Mescal’s mouth a tiny O of wonder.

“It takes a lot of men to make a guuuuuuun!” he sings. “Huuuundrrreds! Many men to make a guuuuuun.”

I mean, just listen to that. What a musical, eh? Who wouldn’t want to be in such a one as that? So great, so sad. So full of longing. “It takes a lot of men to make a guuuuuuun!” Mescal’s voice is deep and tremulous. The joy on his face is exquisite.