Paul Mescal's evolution: how the Irish actor is changing what it means to be a leading man

Irish Examiner

23-05-2025

ONCE upon a time, movie stars lived in the clouds. They arrived on red carpets like gods descending from Olympus, cloaked in mystique, their charm filtered through decades of studio polish and publicist precision.
We didn't know them, not really, and that was the point. They were larger than life, basically untouchable. You couldn't imagine Tom Cruise queuing for a sandwich, or Julia Roberts dragging her wheelie bin down a laneway on a dank Tuesday morning.
Thankfully, those walls have come down. That version of stardom has bent to the times. Nowadays it's less celestial, more terrestrial. In its place is something more fragmented, and, perhaps, more truthful. Audiences no longer want their stars to feel like myths, they want them to feel like people — flawed, awkward, complex, and most of all real.
In that cultural pivot, Paul Mescal has quietly become the face of a new kind of movie star. Not because he wanted to, necessarily, but because he showed us another way to be.
Mescal is one of a number of modern stars — alongside Timothée Chalamet, Florence Pugh, Josh O'Connor, Zendaya — that fits the bill of a modern movie star, but he stands apart for his unadulterated relatability.
In the decades since the heyday of the traditional movie star, we've seen the rise of the franchise actor, the influencer-turned-thespian, the superhero chameleon.
In this scramble for visibility, authenticity has become the rarest currency. Audiences are no longer dazzled by size or spectacle; they crave that Mescalian brand of interiority. On and off screen, he offers it in spades.
The Maynooth man didn't crash into the spotlight with blockbuster energy. He emerged, almost gently, in Normal People, clad in his now iconic O'Neill's GAA shorts, as Connell Waldron — a young man burdened by sensitivity and class confusion.
Paul Mescal and Daisy Edgar Jones in 'Normal People'. Picture: Enda Bowe
In doing so, he offered something radically different: emotional vulnerability and unpolished masculinity. Audiences didn't realise what they wanted until it was in front of them. But now they know. What's striking is how quickly they recognised that deviation and gravitated toward it.
Normal People became a cultural moment during covid. Connell's silver chain even had its own Instagram account, for god's sake. But more than that, Mescal's performance tapped into a deep hunger for representation of a
certain kind of person — the kind who is unsure of himself, who suffers but can't always say why, who loves deeply but awkwardly. The Irishman played that part not like a marquee star, but like someone who'd lived it.
With his burgeoning career still in its relative infancy, Mescal has since walked a path that seems deliberately crooked. While others in his position might have sprinted toward the security of a franchise or big-budget spectacle, he did exactly the opposite. He chose a harder but ultimately more respected route.
Intimate, often uncomfortable films have become his playground. In God's Creatures, he delivered a disturbing, knotty performance that refused easy resolution. In Aftersun, he tore through the heart of cinema itself. In Andrew Haigh's heart-rending All of Us Strangers, his deep pain and sadness destroyed audiences and now, in Oliver Hermanus' The History of Sound, he's about to tear through it all again.
This week, he will tread the tapis rouge for the second time at the Cannes Film Festival alongside co-star — and fellow softboi — Josh O'Connor, as they premiere the romantic drama on the Croisette.
Mescal and O'Connor have risen the ranks of stardom together and have become good friends in the process. This union was inevitable.
Mescal's 'The History of Sound' co-star Josh O'Connor.
While they were born on different sides of the Irish Sea, they have become the poster boys for this new era of stardom. Delicate, vulnerable, but still classy in all the important ways.
Their on-screen and off-screen personas rarely differ too much and that is less a swipe at their inability to get lost in a role than it is a compliment on how much of themselves they are willing to let the audience in on. Transparency is the name of the game.
It's worth returning to Aftersun. Charlotte Wells' debut feature didn't make a major splash at the box office, but it stunned critics and provided a platform for Mescal's talent to soar.
As Calum, a young Scottish father desperately wrestling with his mental health issues while on holiday with his daughter, Mescal offered a devastatingly internal performance.
It was the sort of acting that conceals emotion in ways that make us feel it more acutely. With Aftersun, Mescal earned both an Oscar nomination and the trust of an audience that now expects him to do something more than just entertain. We expect him to move us.
Of course, he too can entertain. Which brings us to Gladiator II, Mescal's first foray into big-budget fare and the first time his stardom was ever brought into question.
Before its release, audiences wondered if the actor, known for his indie sensibilities, would be able to handle the transition to tentpole filmmaking. This felt like the moment when Mescal would 'go big'. Spoiler: He did. The film earned $340m and he was praised by most for shouldering the weight of the picture.
Impressively, in that enormous frame, Mescal doesn't cower or disappear. He doesn't puff up to fill the space either. He carves out something precise and human.
While the film boasts spectacle on top of all the sword-and-sandal pageantry expected of a Roman epic, Mescal brings something else entirely: Restraint.
Paul Mescal as Lucius in Gladiator II
As Lucius, he doesn't attempt to replicate Russell Crowe's gruff and brooding Maximus. He does some theatrical gazing onto the horizon, for sure, but he also does something more commendable by building a character from uncertainty.
Lucius is a man wrestling with history, family, and identity. Mescal still gets to lock swords with adversaries but there is also a performance that dares to slow things down, to suggest that even in Rome's most operatic moments, a man can feel small, unsure, even afraid.
By doing so, Mescal sprinkles a pinch of realism into Ridley Scott's oft-times preposterous Shakespearean spectacle.
Critics did praise the film's ambition and grandeur, but many singled out Mescal's performance as its soul. It's a curious thing, in a film of that scale, for audiences to come away talking about a single glance or moment of stillness in a sea of violence. That's the Mescal effect.
And so, post- Gladiator, the question isn't whether Paul Mescal is a movie star. He is. The question is what kind of star he wants to be — and what kind of star we now want.
His career suggests that stardom is not a goal but a byproduct. He's not playing to the gallery, even if he has just taken the role of Paul McCartney in the upcoming Beatles biopic. He's not chasing fame for fame's sake. When he speaks in interviews, he does so with thoughtfulness, even discomfort.
He's open about therapy. He doesn't pretend the attention doesn't rattle him. He still gets nervous. Still misses Kildare.
Mescal represents a particularly Irish kind of fame, a humility shaped by place. However, it is more than just that. Mescal's appeal lies in how his Irishness remains unfiltered. He hasn't changed his accent. He hasn't dulled his edges.
He's helped shift the dial on what international audiences expect from Irish actors, not just lyrical charm or brooding poet types, but complexity, modernity, and truth.
He's part of a wider wave of Irish talent, of course.
Saoirse Ronan, Barry Keoghan, Andrew Scott, Jessie Buckley — these are actors not only from the oul' sod but of the oul' sod, grounded in place and culture but never defined by it. They are living proof that Irish talent doesn't have to conform to cliches to succeed. They just need to be themselves.
Mescal's trajectory is especially fascinating because he walks such a narrow line between arthouse and blockbuster, between intimacy and scale, vulnerability and strength. He is as comfortable in a slow-burning indie as he is at the centre of a Hollywood colossus. That range is rare. That control, rarer still.
Mescal has arrived, and now he's asking what the arrival even means. Stardom today isn't about dominating the conversation.
It's about having the courage to be quiet in a noisy room. The modern movie star doesn't need to tower above. They don't need to dazzle us. They just need to tell the truth. In Paul Mescal, we're not seeing the return of the old-school star. We're seeing the future. Not a supernova, but a slow-burning flame.
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