The Music in Paul Mescal
There’s a quiet thread running through Paul Mescal’s career that often gets overshadowed by the acclaim for his acting, and that’s music. Long before he was an Oscar nominee, Mescal was the kid recording himself singing at the piano, and that instinct never really left him. It surfaced early and unexpectedly in NORMAL PEOPLE, when the show’s soundtrack and Connell’s silver chain became cultural artefacts in their own right, so much so that Mescal auctioned off the actual chain to raise funds for the suicide prevention charity Pieta. Around the same period he even took part in a virtual gig with fellow Irish talent Dermot Kennedy, a small but telling sign of where his interests lay outside scripts. Not long after, he popped up in THE ROLLING STONES’ music video for “Scarlet,” a brief but very real brush with rock royalty that hinted at bigger things to come.
His relationship with singer Phoebe Bridgers deepened that connection further. Mescal appeared in her music video for “Savior Complex” and lent backing vocals to her cover of “So Much Wine,” small contributions, but ones that placed him properly inside a musician’s world rather than just adjacent to it. Then came CARMEN, the loose, dance-driven reimagining of Bizet’s opera, where Mescal played a border patrol officer swept into a story built on rhythm and movement as much as dialogue. Critics singled out his physicality and his singing, a clear signal that this wasn’t just a novelty for him but a genuine skill he’d been quietly building.
That groundwork paid off properly with THE HISTORY OF SOUND, in which Mescal and Josh O’Connor play two young music students turned folk song collectors, falling for each other while recording disappearing Americana across wartime New England and Maine. It’s as close to a full immersion in musicianship as Mescal has come, and by all accounts he embraced the folk tradition at the heart of the film wholeheartedly. Around the same time, he joined Richard Linklater’s extraordinary, decades-long production of MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG, stepping into the musical’s lead role of composer Franklin Shepard, complete with singing and dancing, a project unlike anything else in his filmography given its twenty-year shooting timeline.
All of which sets the stage for what’s arguably the most significant music-adjacent role of his career: playing Sir Paul McCartney in Sam Mendes’s four-part Beatles anthology. Mescal has confirmed he’ll do his own singing for the role, and has spoken about how deeply the preparation has affected him personally, describing it as something that’s lit a fire under his own songwriting and reshaped how he listens to music altogether. He’s met McCartney himself on two occasions and has talked with real warmth about the experience. It’s a full-circle moment for an actor whose relationship with music has quietly deepened with almost every role he’s taken, and it’s hard not to wonder whether Mescal the musician might end up being just as interesting a story as Mescal the actor.
