Paul Mescal may resist the term, but he has achieved sensational screen chemistry in at least two of his roles, including All Of Us Strangers. He tells Screen about achieving fizz opposite Andrew Scott in the Bafta-nominated film — spoilers follow.
Ever since his breakout role in lockdown TV smash Normal People, Paul Mescal, a Screen Star of Tomorrow in 2020, has proved himself to be an alluring presence, capable of enormous empathy and range, be it on stage or screen.
In Andrew Haigh’s All Of Us Strangers, a haunting adaptation of Taichi Yamada’s 1987 novel Strangers, Mescal vividly portrays Harry, neighbour to Andrew Scott’s Adam. The two men live in the same east London tower block and meet one evening when Harry drunkenly turns up at the door of Adam’s apartment, where he is rebuffed. Eventually, the two men begin a relationship, as Adam, a lonely screenwriter, revisits his suburban childhood home where he somehow meets his mother and father (played by Claire Foy and Jamie Bell), who died in a car crash when he was nearly 12.
All Of Us Strangers — which Searchlight Pictures opened in the US in December and the UK in late January following its premiere at Telluride — was a no-brainer for Mescal, offering him the opportunity to work with Andrews Haigh and Scott — “it would be difficult for a film with those two people at the centre of it to go wrong” — as well as the chance to play someone “a little bit more forward than other characters I’ve played”.
Mescal opted to have Harry, whose family have effectively disowned him for being gay, come from Leeds. “There’s something interesting about him escaping some place like Leeds and coming to London, hoping for a more expansive life, and having a smaller one when he gets there,” explains Mescal. “I can relate to that feeling of leaving a place, hoping for something because it’s been dictated to you that life happens in the big city. But if your family doesn’t accept you, doesn’t give [you love], you’re fucked before you begin. So, I was working back from that. A lot of acting should feel intuitive.”
By the time the film ends, a major revelation — spoiler alert — recalibrates our view of Harry. When Mescal first read the script, he was floored by what is revealed. “Then it made total sense, because it’s not about what’s real, what’s not. It’s about what do we feel?” As such, Mescal plays Harry as a real person rather than, say, a ghost. “Because he’s also unaware of what’s going on. For all intents and purposes, he is as real as Adam is. That would have been one of the only things that would have made me not want to be involved — if there was a prerequisite to do ‘spooky acting’.”
As Adam’s memories and reveries coalesce with his reality, he reconnects with his dead parents, which allows him to open up and find connection and romance with the mysterious Harry. “We knew each other a little bit. Grew to know each other quite well during the filming, and have been getting closer and closer and closer,” says Mescal of Scott. “What he does in this film is an absolute joke in terms of the standard of performance and how lightly he wears it.”
Connective tissue
On screen, the two Ireland-born actors have what critics and casting directors like to call ‘chemistry’, in much the same way Mescal and Edgar-Jones had ‘chemistry’ in Normal People, even if he bristles at the term. “It’s not a word that actors [use],” Mescal insists. “But you must endeavour a little bit to try and fall in love, in whatever that capacity is. And Andrew is a very easy person to fall in love with. He’s kind, generous, talented. We shot the film at the perfect junction in our friendship where there was a lot we didn’t know about each other, but there was mutual admiration and respect. And a similar sense of humour.”
Remarkably, the pair had no rehearsal time together. Did they know instantly that their onscreen relationship was working? “Yeah, it felt fizzy when we were acting,” says Mescal. “Especially with that first scene at the door — it’s so well-written. You feel like you’re dancing through the scene, you can go in loads of different ways, and if I went one way, Andrew would go another. If that’s what chemistry is, I was aware it was happening.”
While All Of Us Strangers was nominated for six Baftas, including outstanding British film and supporting actor and actress for Mescal and Foy, Scott was, surprisingly, overlooked by the leading actor jury. “It’s the stuff of dreams to make a film that is independent, and for an organisation to recognise the film and your performance, Claire’s performance and Andrew Haigh,” begins Mescal, choosing his words carefully. “[But] I’m perplexed and confused. How can an institution recognise all those things and neglect that? It doesn’t make sense.
“This is not a criticism of anybody else’s performance in that category. It’s not even a criticism of Bafta. I think a mistake happened.”
In the aftermath of Normal People, while Edgar-Jones largely pursued opportunities in the US, Mescal stayed mostly in the UK doing smaller films, among them Aftersun (for which he was nominated for best leading actor by both Bafta and Oscar) and theatre (winning an Olivier Award for A Streetcar Named Desire). He says he was offered several big movies but, as both actor and viewer, is drawn to indie films.
One massive movie that did take Mescal’s fancy, however, was Gladiator 2, Ridley Scott’s upcoming sequel to his Oscar-winning epic, which Mescal recently wrapped following a strike-imposed hiatus. “You would struggle to find a single actor on the planet who would say no to Ridley Scott and Gladiator, because Gladiator was an amazing character study.
“I loved every second working with him,” he continues. “I loved having to adjust the way I’ve worked, particularly in the last couple of years, to work with somebody who’s the master of what he does. You don’t have to imagine anything. He gives you scale, he gives you extras, he gives you horses.
“Having said that,” adds Mescal, “I’m looking forward to doing something that will probably be predominantly single camera, a $7m-$8m film in the next couple of weeks.”
That film is Living director Oliver Hermanus’s The History Of Sound with Josh O’Connor, which has been in the works since 2020, and Mescal has already started shooting Richard Linklater’s musical Merrily We Roll Along, which, similar to the director’s Boyhood, is a years-of-filming odyssey. He also has Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet, in which he plays William Shakespeare, booked for later in the year.
While the likes of Hermanus’s film “will always feel like home”, Mescal notes regarding his Scott epic: “I felt an immense relief that the job still felt like the job, doing something like Gladiator, as it did on Aftersun, as it did on All Of Us Strangers. That was the big thing I didn’t know going into it — whether it would still feel the same.” Fortunately for Mescal — and for the breadth of roles the experience potentially opens up — it did.
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