Paul Mescal Says He May Be Done Playing Sad Guys

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.”

Mescal physically shudders at the idea of himself as a leading man or movie star. “To me, an actor is the gold standard,” he says, listing Philip Seymour Hoffman, Daniel Day-Lewis, and Michelle Williams as artistic patron saints. He felt particularly “uncomfy” about the way he was objectified when Normal People’s sex scenes shot to the top of streaming queues across the globe, after which he became known for the thigh-baring Gaelic football shorts he casually wears offscreen. A man in metamorphosis, Mescal is trying to learn how to stay emotionally vulnerable without putting his personal life out there for vultures to pick clean. He seems determined to keep his romantic life private—a pivot from the days when his Twitter flirtation with musician Phoebe Bridgers blossomed into a lengthy relationship before the public’s eyes.

On the how-online-are-you scale, Mescal rates himself a six, but then quickly downgrades it to a five. “I don’t have Instagram. I sometimes dip onto Twitter, which is a fucking mistake every single time,” he says. “YouTube is my thing. I’m a recent supporter of the Boston Red Sox, so I’ll watch the MLB highlights on the way into work.” He also has plenty of WhatsApp group chats, including one with his Beatles costars and others with fellow performers. “I was saying to Jessie the other day, it’s crazy that our friendship group is my favorite actors in the world: Josh [O’Connor], Andrew [Scott], Saoirse [Ronan], Daisy [Edgar-Jones],” he says, wide-eyed. “I don’t spend time often talking to them about acting. They’re just my friends. But I’m inspired by them.”

Belt by Brunello Cucinelli.

Photographer Theo Wenner. Fashion Editor Tom Guinness.

Photographer Theo Wenner. Fashion Editor Tom Guinness.

That’s the best bit of being successful for him. The worst? He pauses for so long I wonder if the screen has frozen. “The worst part is feeling like your mistakes are magnified, both personally and professionally,” he finally replies, alluding to what he’d earlier described as his “brittle” self-confidence. “But it’s a small tax to pay.”

Asked what his fans get right about him—and what they get wrong—Mescal replies, “I don’t expect people to get me. I am grateful to the people that care about the work I do, but I can’t care too deeply about the people who don’t.” Which is a white lie, he instantly confesses with a wink, putting his head in his hands. “That’s a permanent fixture in my therapy session: Why doesn’t everybody love me?”

Set Design Julia Wagner; DP Shane Sigler; Location Ealing Studios; Groomer Josh Knight; Manicurist Adam Slee; Produced by Casa Projects. For details, go to VF.com/credits.