Paul Mescal on Gladiator II, Irish fans, and future plans
Paul Mescal in conversation with Weekend magazine. Picture: Gareth Cattermole
As he prepares to dominate one gladiatorial arena, Paul Mescal is gazing out from the stadium stands at another.
Having discussed his biggest movie yet in various hotel rooms around the world, Mescal’s home run is being held at Croke Park.
“It’s definitely my favourite place that I’ve done,” he says, looking down on the pitch from high up in GAA HQ’s Cusack Stand on a sunny winter’s day. “I mean, look at it.”
It was here, just over a decade earlier, that the younger Mescal proudly lined out for his native Kildare in two consecutive Leinster minor football finals.
His team were victorious against Westmeath in the 2013 final before losing to Dublin the following year.
A present-day kick around on the hallowed turf proves he hasn’t lost his touch.
Mescal is upbeat following the premiere of his new film, Gladiator II, the night before, where crowds of fans and well-wishers thronged the street in front of Dublin’s Lighthouse Cinema.
This journalist can remember only one Irish premiere whose star drew a larger crowd in recent years.
“Who was it?” he asks, curious. Tom Cruise.
He shakes his head and laughs, still taken by the sheer warmth of the reception the night before.
“It sounds maybe naive, but I wasn’t expecting the scale of that last night. Just because I knew I was going to be doing this part of the leg by myself, and you know yourself with these tours, you don’t really take stock until you’re smack bang in the middle of it.
"I just found last night, in the best sense of the word, really positively overwhelming.”
Hours before the premiere, dozens of people turned up donning sunglasses, hoodies and GAA shorts a la Connell from to take part in a Paul Mescal lookalike contest.
He hadn’t heard about it until it was close to wrapping up, he says. Was he worried he wouldn’t win if he had shown up?
“Ha ha! To be honest, it’s very easy to do a parody of me, so there’s a good chance I wouldn’t have even won my own competition.”
The buzz of the day before is symbolic of Mescal’s growing appeal among fans at home and internationally.
Having stolen the hearts of viewers — along with co-star Daisy Edgar Jones — in the much-loved , the Maynooth actor has in just five years since carved out a hugely successful career.
Among the family members and friends in the audience for the premiere was filmmaker Lenny Abrahamson, who cast him in that first leading role.
“He means the world to me,” he says of the director. “To see him, to be in front of a film of this scale… it’s down to him saying yes to me six years ago, you know. That will never be lost on me.”
Mescal was already making noise in theatre circles while still a student at Trinity College’s The Lir Academy before Abrahamson cast him in the TV series adaptation of Sally Rooney’s novel.
In the years since, he has impressed opposite Emily Watson in the dark Irish-set drama , starred opposite a never-better Andrew Scott in the soulful and profoundly moving , and received an Oscar nomination for his role in the beautifully
observed father-daughter drama, .
They were prolific and well-received films, but taking on a sequel to a Ridley Scott 2000 classic is another level altogether.
Scott revitalised the historical epic with , starring Russell Crowe in a film that took more than €465m at the box office, was nominated for 12 Oscars and won five, including Best Picture.
Two and a half decades later, we once again see a warrior take on the might of the Roman Empire.
Mescal plays the character of Lucius, a boy in the first film, who returns to the Colosseum, his heart filled with rage and the future of the empire at stake.
He remembers watching the 2000 film with his father, also Paul, as a teenager, and being taken with the sheer scale of it.
Once he heard he was in the conversation to star in Scott’s sequel, it was a no-brainer, he says, to take on the biggest production he’s ever worked on. What did it feel like walking onto those sets for the first time?
“We kind of shot it semi-chronologically, so the first set that I walked onto was the opening sequence battle. That was arguably the biggest set of the whole film for me, in terms of scale.
"The Coliseum was huge, but that was... what you see in those aerial shots, especially of the internal castle walls, that’s what it looked like. It was a city built in the middle of the Sahara. So actually that was a great place to start.
“Ridley’s directed , , , — I do think he is a genius. He didn’t need to sell me on the vision. Of course, I wanted to read the script before I absolutely said yes, but before I read it I was massively leaning towards doing it.”
He had some slight concerns, he says, about taking on such a major role, but set them aside quickly.
“Once you say yes, you can’t really go down that rabbit hole too long or else you’ll never really be able to fulfill anything within it. So I put that out of my mind as quickly as possible once I said yes.”
The British filmmaker, it emerges, was pleased to hear about his leading man’s prowess on the GAA pitch, knowing it would help when it came to filming the movie’s gritty stunt and fight-heavy scenes.
"Also, I had a desire to do a majority of my own stunts.
“It helped that I’ve been around gym environments before with sport, and the challenge was just the time required.
"Not the time per day, because I had a trainer who was excellent at knowing the way that I liked to work, which was fast and efficient, get in, get out. He would call us snipers. He was like: ‘We’re sniping the muscle groups per day’.
“I think actors can kind of get obsessed, if you’re doing some sort of superhero film, where you go to the gym for four hours a day. Maybe that’s true for some people.
"But I also think we kind of fetishise this 50,000 calories and 40 hours in the gym, when actually, you’re given everything on a plate.
"If you’re working on a big studio film like this, you have a trainer, they tell you what to eat. The hard part is you have to follow their advice, which requires diligence and focus.”
In the movie, many of Mescal’s key scenes are with Denzel Washington, who plays the Roman emperor Macrinus.
“That’s at the centre of the film really, that power dynamic, and Lucius’s relationship with his mother (Connie Nielsen). It was the stuff of dreams, acting opposite him. He’s so fundamentally charismatic and fundamentally intelligent in the way that he approaches things.”
When Mescal was small, he recalls seeing his dad – who always had a keen interest in acting – taking to the stage for the first time.
“The memory that always jumps out to me, which I don’t remember having a visceral impact on me at the time, but I remember it very clearly, was going to see my dad do a play called Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell.
“My dad used to work with a semi-professional theatre company. I hadn’t seen him in anything before. I didn’t know it was a one-man play at the time, but it was my dad playing all these different characters. There are two things I remember — I remember eating popcorn and chocolate, and I remember being like: ‘When is my dad going to come out?’”
Though he says it wasn’t a eureka moment that made him decide he wanted to be an actor, he realised how much his father enjoyed what he was doing.
It hasn’t traditionally been something, he feels, that Irish teenagers feel is naturally or easily accessible.
“It’s not like living in London or LA or New York, where you’re surrounded by the idea or immersed in it. So I think there’s something to be said about it building organically, and then it becomes a compulsion. Not to say that it’s handed to anybody who lives in these places, but I think there’s an infrastructure that makes becoming an actor easier in different cities, in different countries.”
With Mescal’s star-wattage only likely to increase following the release of the sword and sandals blockbuster, he has already got several other roles on the way.
Next month, he will join US filmmaker Richard Linklater for the latest shooting instalment of an extraordinary long-term project.
The adaptation of Stephen Sondheim’s musical comedy is filming at regular intervals over a 20-year period.
This is to reflect the characters ageing over that period of time on screen. It’s a remarkable feat the filmmaker previously pulled off with , his Oscar-winning coming-of-age drama filmed over a 12-year period.
“It’s fantastic. I love it,” Mescal says of the experience so far. “It just feels like an oasis to get to it, you know? We go off and live our lives, and then we’re in Austin, Texas, shooting the film.”
In the New Year, he will return to the stage in London and New York for a run of his Olivier-Award-winning role in .
We will also see him opposite Killarney actress Jessie Buckley in , the screen adaptation of Irish author Maggie O’Farrell’s novel.
“I think she’s one of the greatest actors working today, categorically, hands down,” he says of his Irish co-star.
“I’ve been blown away by so many people, but no more so than her. We were friends before, but something just mad happened, making that, where I was like: ‘I’ve met somebody now who’s going to be a vital part of my life outside of the world of acting forever’.”
- Gladiator II is out now
