Profile: Can Paul Mescal carry a Hollywood blockbuster?

How did that happen?

Six short years ago, a 22-year-old unknown from Maynooth called Paul Mescal appeared in a now celebrated TV ad for a popular sausage brand.

Sitting at the kitchen table with his parents, he takes a goodly bite of the product and declares he has decided to travel the world.

We then cut to the gormless but cheery young fella sitting at the back of a bus trundling its way to the sunny climes of Bally . . . haunis.

It was funny stuff. All great actors have to begin somewhere and YouTube is full of early and sometimes cringe-worthy screen appearances by today’s stars of stage and screen but who would have thought back then that Mescal would now be on the cusp of becoming a Hollywood A-lister himself?

Normal People made him but now we are about to see him in the lead role of one of the most eagerly anticipated movies of the year – Gladiator II. When the first trailer for Ridley Scott’s sequel to his 2000 sword and sandal epic was released during the week, it was an event.

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Set 20 years after the first movie, it sees a muscle-bound Mescal play Lucius Verus, the rightful heir to the empire and son to Lucilla and the trailer sure packs a lot in. We see Lucius being captured as a slave by the Romans and forced to fight in that crucible of cruelty, the Colosseum, tackling a pretty annoyed rhino, giving it socks in a spectacular sea battle, and facing off in a showdown with the brutal General Acacius (Pedro Pascal).

It seems the Maynooth man can do no wrong at the moment but with only eight (mostly very good) movies and one TV ad under his belt, the big question now is has Paul Mescal got the star power to open a big budget blockbuster?

Given the wild success of the first Gladiator film, this might seem like a moot point but cast your mind back twenty years to another fast-rising Irish star who won acclaim for his early roles before coming a cropper when he starred in his own historical epic.

In 2004, Colin Farrell, who was also 28 at the time, was enjoying his own rise as a heartthrob and hot new star and then . . . well, then he appeared as the flaxen-haired king of Ancient Greece in Oliver Stone’s ill-fated Alexander. The three-hour epic bombed at the box office and was mauled like a pride of lions by the critics.

However, it has to be said that Mescal seems more centred than the Farreller of 2004, who was then busy burnishing his reputation as a Hollywood bad boy.

And after all, timing is everything. A year after that sausage ad (for which he was paid €5000), Mescal landed the role that launched his career and in many ways still defines him.

Just a month into the pandemic lockdown in April 2020 with the world was in freezeframe, the TV adaptation of Sally Rooney’s Normal People arrived in highly digestible half-hour episodes on the RTÉ Player and BBC iPlayer.

It told the painfully intimate story of the romance between star-crossed young lovers Connell Waldron (Mescal) and Marriane Sheridan (an equally impressive Daisy Edgar-Jones) and captive audience or not, it was to become a modern TV phenomenon.

The sex scenes set monocles popping and tongues wagging on that barometer of all that is sacred and profane in Ireland, Liveline, and viewers seemed either enchanted by the strange romance between Connell and Marriane or frustrated by their inability to actually communicate, which may have been the point.

Either way, Mescal’s portrayal of the not so strong but silent type marked him out as a rare talent but it was one scene in particular that left audiences reeling and casting directors scrambling for his agent’s number.

Just as our own emotions teetered on an existential edge during lockdown, Mescal disrupted the idea of the emotionally reserved Irish male in a lingering scene of Connell breaking down during a therapy session. It was a stunningly realistic and harrowing portrayal of human frailty and a rare and very welcome moment of male insecurity in a TV drama.

Mescal won a BAFTA TV Award and a nomination for a Primetime Emmy Award for the role and that key scene was echoed in 2022’s Aftersun when Mescal, as troubled young father Callum, can be seen sobbing in despair as he sits on the side of a bed.

So, reservoirs of vulnerability, oodles of sex appeal and a huge likeability factor, it seems Mescal can do no wrong.

After Normal People, he starred in the psychological dramas The Lost Daughter (2021) and God’s Creatures (2022). Aftersun earned him nominations for an Academy Award and BAFTA Film Award and he took home a Laurence Olivier Award for his portrayal of Stanley Kowalski in a 2022 revival of A Streetcar Named Desire. The following year, he starred in the drama All of Us Strangers, for which he received his second BAFTA Film Award nomination.

Any danger that he might be more sizzle than, well, sausage was firmly banished after industry recognition like that. The cynics may not like it but we are dealing with raw talent here and Mescal’s very ordinary upbringing never gave any hint at potential greatness.

He is the eldest of three children (his sister Nell is a London-based singer songwriter and his brother Donnacha lives in New York) to parents Dearbhla, a Garda, and Paul, a schoolteacher who acted semi-professionally as well.

Mescal attended Maynooth Post Primary School and was a minor and under-21 Gaelic football player for Kildare and a member of the Maynooth GAA club. However, a promising future on the field was cut short after he sustained a jaw injury.

He had already made his stage debut a few years earlier aged 16 playing the lead role in a production of The Phantom of the Opera and in 2017, he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Acting from The Lir Academy at Trinity College Dublin, which lists his interests as GAA, rugby, boxing, singing, guitar and writing.

Before even graduating from the Lir, he starred as Jay Gatsby in an “immersive” production of The Great Gatsby at the Gate Theatre in Dublin, where the bright young things of West Egg freely mingled among the actual audience.

Ireland if not the world has been seized by Mescalmania and the fascination is only likely to increase as we near the release of Gladiator II. However, the actor is guarded about his private life.

Resident in London since 2020, he also has a house in Ireland and says he intends to spend more time here. He is open about seeing a therapist, which he says is “to keep sane” and that he is angered by what he calls “the entitlement to the information that people expect” and that private matters “should never be commented on” because it is “indecent” as well as “unkind”.

Mescal, who plays piano, guitar and sings, was in a relationship with singer Phoebe Bridgers and appeared in the music video for her song Savior Complex.

He has also become a very unlikely style icon, something that amuses him as much as it bemuses some people who reckon he looks like a bloke you’d see down the pub. A connoisseur of nonchalant GAA chic, recently a debate raged online about what constitutes “short shorts” after the actor was seen in a pair at the Gucci menswear show in Milan.

He has said his “go-to is white T-shirt and jeans… or black tie with a twist” but this is also the man who started a rush on men’s silver-chain necklaces after Connell sported one in Normal People and who has been spotted in a gold dinner jacket.

But modest Mescal has zero airs and graces. Not that we’d ever let him forget about that ad from 2018 but he is always happy to acknowledge his humble beginnings flogging proceeded meat.

Speaking to Today FM’s Dave Moore during the week – with the kind of understatement we’d expect from Connell Waldron – he said, “Going from sausage ads to this wasn’t on the bingo card for me.”

Mescal’s rise has been nothing short of breathtaking and his manly melancholia has marked him out very quickly as one of the coming stars of the era. As he told the Financial Times last year, “I’m interested in the two extremes. Like the extreme of male vitality, brutality and physicality. I’m interested in that as a shape and why men choose to be that way.”

Buffed, bearded and bronzed and prepared to do battle in Gladiator II, we shall have to see if the magnetic and vulnerable Mescal will be a thoroughly modern man in ancient Rome.

Alan Corr @CorrAlan2