Paul Mescal strolls through London’s Highbury Fields with the easy confidence of someone who has found his rhythm in an industry notorious for grinding down its brightest stars. Sunglasses perched casually on his face, his signature mullet catching the afternoon light, he moves with an unhurried spring in his step that speaks to a man genuinely at peace with his meteoric rise. The 28-year-old Irish actor, fresh from his starring role in HAMNET, has just wrapped a candid conversation with Rolling Stone that reveals as much about his grounded perspective as it does about his soaring career trajectory.

The meeting spot he chose—a pub called the Famous Cock—elicits a characteristic laugh from Mescal. “Ha! It’s pretty identifiable, isn’t it?” The choice feels emblematic of an actor who refuses to take himself too seriously despite now being considered one of Hollywood’s most promising talents. As he navigates the park paths, nodding respectfully to elderly gentlemen and playfully weaving around strollers, there’s something remarkably unaffected about his presence. This is a movie star who still finds joy in the simple act of walking through a neighborhood he’s grown to love.

Since breaking through with his raw, emotionally devastating performance in NORMAL PEOPLE, Mescal has built a career defined by both artistic integrity and surprising versatility. His recent turn in HAMNET showcased his ability to inhabit complex historical narratives, while earlier roles in films like AFTERSUN proved his capacity for intimate, contemporary storytelling. Each project seems carefully chosen, reflecting an actor more interested in depth than breadth, substance over spectacle.

But it’s his upcoming challenge that truly captures the scope of his ambition. Mescal is currently deep in rehearsals to portray Paul McCartney in Sam Mendes’ ambitious quartet of Beatles biopics, slated for release in 2028. The role represents not just a career pinnacle but a chance to embody one of his genuine heroes. “I’ve met him a couple of times. I adore him. I think he changed the world,” Mescal says of McCartney with an enthusiasm that transcends professional obligation.

The preparation for such an iconic role has given Mescal something he didn’t expect to appreciate: structure. “It’s a version of a weird 9-to-5, and I thought I would hate that and I actually am loving that. I do like structure a lot. I like a plan. I like rehearsals.” For an actor who admits that “everybody—everybody?—wants to be in a musical,” the McCartney project represents the perfect convergence of his passions for music, performance, and storytelling.

Mescal’s love affair with music runs deep, extending far beyond professional requirements. He speaks with genuine reverence about “music with a context,” Irish folk traditions, and the Beatles’ transformative impact on popular culture. This isn’t the casual name-dropping of a celebrity trying to appear cultured—it’s the sincere appreciation of someone who understands music as both art form and cultural force.

When Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor sat down for Entertainment Weekly’s LIE vs LIE segment, what started as promotional fun for their new film THE HISTORY OF SOUND quickly spiraled into something far more revealing and uncomfortable than either actor likely anticipated.

The premise was simple enough: two co-stars, a handful of prompts, and the challenge of weaving truth and fiction so seamlessly that even they couldn’t tell where reality ended and fabrication began. But when Mescal was asked to share a fan encounter that stuck with him, the Irish actor launched into a story that had O’Connor—and viewers—questioning not just its veracity, but its appropriateness for a lighthearted promotional game.

Mescal painted the scene with uncomfortable precision: London’s stage door after a performance of A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE, where he found himself posing for photos with fans, as actors do. Enter a woman in her fifties with her daughter, both enthusiastic about his work in NORMAL PEOPLE and his theatrical performance that evening. What happened next, according to Mescal’s account, crossed boundaries in a way that left him unsettled enough to remember it months later.

The telling detail wasn’t just in Mescal’s words, but in his need to physically demonstrate the encounter, asking O’Connor’s permission before placing hands on him to recreate whatever inappropriate gesture this alleged fan had made. The moment crystallized the strange intimacy that actors develop while promoting films together—the way they become comfortable enough to use each other’s bodies as props for storytelling, yet still maintain enough respect to ask permission first.

This blend of professional intimacy and personal boundaries runs through THE HISTORY OF SOUND itself, the romantic drama that brought these two actors together in the first place. Opening Friday, the film follows Lionel and David, two men whose connection deepens from their shared studies at the Boston Conservatory to an expedition collecting folk songs in rural Maine after World War I. It’s a story about artistic passion, emotional discovery, and the kind of profound male friendship that existed in an era when such relationships operated in spaces between spoken and unspoken understanding.

The film premiered at Cannes in May to inevitable comparisons with BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN, a parallel that clearly frustrates Mescal. His dismissal of the comparison as “lazy” reveals an actor protective of his work’s unique identity, refusing to let it be reduced to surface similarities. As he pointed out in press conference footage, while both films feature men in outdoor settings, THE HISTORY OF SOUND moves in the opposite direction from BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN’s exploration of repression, instead celebrating openness and artistic expression.

Perhaps that’s what makes Mescal’s fan encounter story so compelling within the context of promoting this particular film. Whether true or fabricated for the game, it speaks to the way public figures navigate inappropriate attention while trying to remain accessible to genuine admirers. The story becomes a small mirror of the film’s larger themes about connection, boundaries, and the courage required to be authentic in a world that doesn’t always know how to respond appropriately.

O’Connor, for his part, had to sit there and determine whether his co-star was telling the truth or spinning an elaborate fiction, just as audiences will have to decide what they believe about the characters these actors bring to life in THE HISTORY OF SOUND. The real game wasn’t lie versus lie, but the more complex challenge of distinguishing between different kinds of truth—the literal and the emotional, the factual and the essential.

In the end, whether Mescal’s fan story actually happened matters less than what it reveals about the strange territory actors occupy, somewhere between public and private, accessible yet vulnerable, always performing even when they’re supposedly just being themselves.

Paul Mescal has become cinema’s most compelling young actor by choosing projects that blur the line between fiction and profound emotional truth. Fresh from his Oscar-nominated performance in AFTERSUN, Mescal is now stepping into the world of William Shakespeare with HAMNET, a film that he describes as feeling “almost like a documentary” despite being entirely fictional.

Standing on the red carpet at the Toronto International Film Festival, Mescal spoke with the conviction of an actor who has found his artistic north star. HAMNET, based on Maggie O’Farrell’s bestselling novel and adapted by O’Farrell alongside director Chloé Zhao, tells the story of Shakespeare’s marriage to Agnes and the devastating death of their son Hamnet—the tragedy that would inspire the playwright to create HAMLET. It’s a narrative built on historical fragments and imaginative reconstruction, yet Mescal believes it captures something essential about the creation of one of literature’s greatest works.

“This book and this script and this film is the closest thing to me that makes sense out of how we got the play HAMLET,” Mescal explained. “It’s fiction, but to me it feels like almost a documentary in terms of how do we make sense out where this piece of art came from.” This perspective reveals something crucial about Mescal’s approach to his craft—his ability to find documentary-like truth in fictional narratives, the same quality that made his portrayal of a grieving father in AFTERSUN so devastatingly authentic.

The project came to life through Mescal’s own advocacy. After reading O’Farrell’s novel, originally published in Canada as “Hamnet and Judith,” he convinced Zhao to take on the adaptation. This kind of creative initiative marks Mescal as more than just a performer; he’s becoming a curator of meaningful cinema, someone who recognizes stories worth telling and has the clout to see them realized.

HAMNET had its world premiere at the Telluride Film Festival before arriving at TIFF, where it’s already generating Oscar buzz. Much of that attention focuses on Jessie Buckley’s portrayal of Agnes, Shakespeare’s wife—a woman who has remained largely invisible in historical accounts despite being central to the playwright’s emotional life. Buckley, who has performed in multiple Shakespeare plays including THE TEMPEST, THE WINTER’S TALE, and ROMEO AND JULIET, brings a unique understanding to the role.

“He’s such a potent spectre in a lot of our lives and never really has been explored to see who the woman might be behind his language and the world that he creates,” Buckley reflected. Her performance promises to illuminate the mysterious figure who lived alongside literature’s most celebrated writer, and she believes the role will influence any future Shakespearean work she undertakes: “Having touched the edges of what that might be, I think if I was ever to play another great female Shakespearean character, she’d definitely be in the bloodstream somewhere there.”

For Mescal, HAMNET represents another bold choice in a career defined by emotional intelligence and artistic risk-taking. From the intimate grief of AFTERSUN to the epic scale of GLADIATOR II, and now to the intimate historical drama of HAMNET, he continues to seek projects that explore the deepest human experiences. His belief that HAMNET feels like a documentary speaks to his commitment to finding truth in storytelling, even when—perhaps especially when—the historical record remains silent.

As scholars know, Shakespeare did have a son named Hamnet who died before HAMLET was written, but there’s no definitive record of how one influenced the other. That gap in history becomes fertile ground for imagination, and in Mescal’s hands, that imagination becomes a vehicle for exploring how art emerges from the most profound personal losses. It’s exactly the kind of project that suits an actor who has made his reputation by finding the universal in the deeply personal, turning every performance into an exploration of what it means to be human.