Paul Mescal Says He’s a ‘Different Guy’ Than He Was Before ‘Normal People’ Made Him a Star

Paul Mescal has stepped into the arena and is ready for his moment. After debuting in the Hulu adaptation of Sally Rooney’s romantic novel “Normal People” in 2020, Mescal has had a meteoric rise, receiving an Academy Award nomination for his performance in “Aftersun” and looking towards another for his turn as Lucius in the epic legacy sequel “Gladiator II.” Reflecting on these whirlwind last few years in a recent interview with GQ, Mescal acknowledged the great distance he feels between who he was four years ago and who he is today.

“I look back at myself at 24, he’s a different guy. Everything was still so ideal in my head. I was so deeply uncynical at that age,” said Mescal. “I don’t mean happier in the broad sense, but it was kind of the montage sequence of, everything’s rosy in the garden. But also the other side of it has always been available to me. I understand the psychological landscape of the characters that I play and that isn’t just from reading the script, it’s from inside you somewhere.”

Though he feels it’s helped him grow as a professional actor and drawn him towards working consistently, others have told him he can be a bit obsessive.

“My agent refers to me openly as a psychopath when it comes to work. I feel an intense desire to have this forever,” Mescal said of the stature he currently has in the industry and artistic freedom it affords him. “I want this to never stop. So with that comes a kind of neurosis of control.”

The Irish actor recognizes how important “Gladiator II” succeeding at the box office will be not only for him, for the film industry as a whole, but at the end of the day, in the same sense of how he’s grown since “Normal People,” he doesn’t expect his career to be defined by one film.

“I know ‘Gladiator’ is by far and away the biggest thing I’ve done in terms of a public-facing responsibility, and the amount of people that are going to get to it,” said Mescal to GQ. “But I think I’ve now built in personal infrastructure where I know the map of what I want to be as an actor. So it’s not the be-all and end-all.”

Paramount Pictures releases “Gladiator II” in theaters November 22.