All things considered, telling Paul Mescal I once placed a bet on him is not quite the icebreaker I had hoped. Or rather, it breaks the ice in an unusual way.
“The key question,” he says, his voice betraying a hint of trepidation, “is what was the bet? Most Likely to Join the 27 Club?”
Wow: that’s bleak – but funny. Josh O’Connor, who plays Mescal’s lover in the austere new wartime love story The History of Sound, certainly thinks so. Cosied up beside his co-star, he is overcome with appalled laughter.
It’s true that Mescal was approaching 27 when I had that flutter on him three years ago. But far from betting that he would meet a premature end at the same tender age as Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and Kurt Cobain, I was throwing down my £25 in a flurry of excitement at his surprise Oscar nomination in 2023 for Charlotte Wells’s Aftersun. He played a young father concealing his suicidal depression from his daughter while they are holidaying together in Turkey. His performance, like the film, is infinitely subtle and mysterious, its thrashing turmoil hidden beneath an opaque surface.
“Sorry about the £25,” says Mescal, who lost to Brendan Fraser in The Whale. “But thanks for the vote of confidence.”
It is an autumnal Saturday afternoon, and we are in a London hotel room. When I entered a few minutes earlier, the PR assistant steered me toward a seat at the other side of the room, far from the two actors. O’Connor, to his credit, having spotted that I had my hands full, sprang to his feet and helpfully dragged my chair closer to him and Mescal. Not for the last time, he gave the impression of being an extremely good boy.
Mescal is equally affable but more puckish. There’s a flicker of danger about him: a carnivorous sexuality in contrast to the more wholesome O’Connor. Today, Mescal is wearing a tatty white T-shirt, the sleeves of which he keeps pushing up until you want to say: Yes, yes, great guns, very impressive, now put them away.
A vaguely bad boy and maybe a goody-two-shoes, then. But they could scarcely seem more devoted to each other. Their tactility and body language is enough to make anyone nearby feel like a gooseberry. At any given moment during our conversation, one of them is usually angled toward the other, head cocked attentively; the only way they could get any closer is if one jumped into the other’s lap. O’Connor will occasionally snake an arm around the back of Mescal’s chair while his friend is speaking, or Mescal will give O’Connor’s arm or knee a reassuring squeeze. The message is clear: we are straight men who have played several gay roles, yet we are relaxed enough in ourselves not to recoil from intimacy.
Right now, Mescal is reflecting on Aftersun while O’Connor, six years his senior and wearing a checked sweatshirt, listens closely. “The Oscars brought the opportunity to celebrate that film in a way that Charlotte and myself had never anticipated,” he says of what was, after all, only his second lead role since the BBC adaptation of Sally Rooney’s Normal People, which made him a star. “You don’t make something like Aftersun and think: ‘I know where we’ll be going in 2023!’ I doubt that will ever be topped for me, because it’s not the sort of film that usually gets recognised in that capacity.”
He’s right: Aftersun is almost an anti-Oscars movie. Even his one crying scene is played in semi-darkness with his back to the camera.
“That film is quietly perfect,” sighs O’Connor, who has been friends with Mescal since video-calling him in 2020 to congratulate him on Normal People. “There’s no crescendo. We’re all so used to awards bait.”
“The ‘reel’, they call it,” says Mescal, referring to the melodramatic film clips shown at awards ceremonies. “The Oscars reel. Jesus.” He sounds mildly disgusted.
We are meeting near the end of 2025 but it is already clear that there is unlikely to be an Oscars reel for The History of Sound, despite their sensitive performances. Mescal plays Lionel, a singer raised on a farm in the American South, who falls for David (O’Connor), a playful and gifted musicologist. Separated when David goes off to fight in the first world war, they reunite for an expedition through rural Maine harvesting folk songs and recording them on wax cylinders.
Among their current crop of films, The History of Sound is eclipsed in Mescal’s case by Hamnet, in which he plays Shakespeare, and for O’Connor by the comic whodunit Wake Up, Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery and the languid heist drama The Mastermind. Still, you can’t win ’em all, and The History of Sound is a film of which they are immensely proud. It is also one to which they both remained attached for four years while funding was being sought. “There were times when we thought it might not happen,” admits O’Connor. “But neither of us ever thought about dropping out.”
Mescal came to the set straight from playing the hero in the Gladiator sequel. “I was 90 kilos and I had eight weeks to get down to 78 kilos,” he grimaces. “It was a real headfuck. I loved the process of making that film but The History of Sound felt like home to me. It’s where I’m most comfortable. I want to make more films like that versus ones on the scale of Gladiator II.”
The love story between Lionel and David would always have been intimate, but the presence of song (though this is no musical) adds an extra dimension. “One of the things I love about this film is that it tells a story of intimacy in a new way,” says O’Connor. “Irrespective of my own insecurities about my voice, singing is such a vulnerable act.”
Mescal agrees. “I think the thrill comes from the vulnerability,” he says. “It’s like in Irish pubs, it’ll be bustling and then you’ll hear: ‘Shh-shhh.’ And that silence before someone opens their mouth to sing is deafening. You’re afraid to breathe.” Has he ever serenaded anyone? “I’ve sung songs to people. But I feel like ‘serenaded’ has a saccharine sound to it.”
Eager to shift the focus away from his personal life, he says: “Josh had two bands!” O’Connor looks sheepish: “They were called Orange Output and Klang. I didn’t sing so much as shout in time.” Orange Output has gained minor notoriety as the band he formed to try to impress Tahliah Barnett, better known now as FKA twigs, after they appeared together in a production of Bugsy Malone at their private school in Cheltenham. When the story broke in 2023, she declared herself “very flattered”.
The more musically confident of the pair, Mescal is about to play Paul McCartney in Sam Mendes’s quartet of Beatles movies, due out in 2028. Those films will be golden oldies in petrol station bargain bins, however, by the time another of his current projects reaches the screen: Mescal is already several years into making Merrily We Roll Along, an adaptation of the Stephen Sondheim musical that follows three friends backwards from their disillusioned 40s to their idealistic 20s. Rather than using ageing makeup, the director Richard Linklater (who took 12 years to shoot Boyhood in a similar fashion) is stretching the production over two decades. Pencil it in the diary for 2040.
Of the two of them, only Mescal has had songs written about him: word is that he is the subject of both Sidelines, by his ex-girlfriend Phoebe Bridgers, and Normal Thing, by his current partner Gracie Abrams. No such luck for O’Connor. “But Paul’s writing a song for me.” Really? “Well, I hope he is.” At that, Mescal starts warbling: “Josh O’Connorrr, the best boyyy!” Hmm. There is a lot of emoting going on but no discernible tune. “God, it’s so catchy,” O’Connor fibs.
He has said that he wanted to make The History of Sound partly so he could see up close how Mescal does what he does. So — what did he discover? “Well, it’s actually really easy,” he jokes. “No. Um. Well. There is something spiritual about what happens. When ‘action’ is called, and you look into your friend’s eyes and see something depart, and something else take its place, that is a very moving experience. Physically, the form is Paul. But emotionally, spiritually, he’s vacated. How he does that, fuck knows.”
Mescal has his own compliment at the ready. “There’s such a generosity of spirit in Josh as a person. He extends that into a performance, sometimes to the detriment of his own well-being. That is an incredibly fucking generous thing to give people for a cinema-going experience. I wouldn’t say he is a method actor but that doesn’t mean he won’t experience the cost to the character because he has such empathy for them.”
Does that ring true? “Yeah,” says O’Connor. “Our friend Jessie Buckley calls actors ‘soul collectors’. We learn something from the characters we play, and they never truly leave us. You can see that Aftersun has left an imprint on my friend here.” The same goes for O’Connor after playing Arthur, the white-suited, crypt-robbing treasure-hunter in Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera. “There is a part of Arthur that I inhabit and that still inhabits me. And there is a cost to you by doing that. But Paul is right: there is something generous about being an actor. You put yourself into someone else’s mind, and that’s an empathetic act.”
Then Mescal drops a bombshell disguised as an aside. “I’m five or six years into this now, and I feel very lucky. But I’m also learning that I don’t think I can go on doing it as much.” Is he talking about rationing himself? “I think so. I’m gonna have to start doing that. For sure.” A caveat follows: “Rationing doesn’t necessarily mean less.” Huh? “It means learning that films like The History of Sound take more out of the well. You can’t keep going back and expect to consistently deliver something you’re proud of. What that rationing looks like, I don’t know. I miss being on stage, so I might have a time when I’m only doing theatre for a couple of years. I also have different priorities in my personal life that I want to attend to.”
There must be mental health issues to consider, too. I can’t help thinking of the troubled David in The History of Sound, who speaks of the “false chord” he feels chiming inside him. Or Calum, the young father cornered and crumbling in Aftersun. They belong to a pattern of men unable to express or resolve what is plaguing them, whereas the actors themselves seem strikingly un-plagued. What’s their secret?
“I don’t know the answer,” says O’Connor. “Being in your life, with your family, having privacy. You have to be in your life. The attention both of us give to taking care of these characters — well, if we went to half that trouble for ourselves in our own lives …” Mescal completes the thought: “We’d be therapists.”
O’Connor likes the rationing idea. “I’m going to take some time off, too,” he decides. How to balance that with the imperative to stay visible and current? Step off the train and it will keep speeding along without you. “That’s the great fear,” says Mescal. “But what’s the alternative? I don’t want to resent the thing I love. This sounds bold, but I’d rather not be on the train if that is the choice.”
“The nightmare is resenting the work,” O’Connor says. “Also, the more we see of an actor, the harder it is for that actor to pull the wool over your eyes and convince you they’re someone else.”
Mescal is staring down the barrel of a months-long awards season campaign for Hamnet. “Once I’ve finished promoting that, I hope nobody gets to see me until 2028 when I’m doing the Beatles. People will get a break from me and I’ll get a break from them.”
He could always keep a low profile until Merrily We Roll Along opens in 15 years or so.
“Can you imagine?” he says, his eyes lighting up.
O’Connor pictures the scene circa the early 2040s: “People will be, like: ‘Why did they cast that absolute nobody in this movie? Remember when he talked about rationing — and then no one ever saw him again?’”
• The History of Sound is in cinemas from 23 January.
