Pajiba 10 FYC: Sad Boy King Paul Mescal

By Jason Adams | Pajiba 10 | December 7, 2023 |

By Jason Adams | Pajiba 10 | December 7, 2023 |

After the meteoric three years that sad boy king Paul Mescal has seen in the wake of the smash limited series Normal People, I was shocked to realize that he hadn’t made it onto the radar of the Pajiba 10 yet. The 27-year-old from Maynooth, Ireland has already won a BAFTA and an Olivier award and he’s been nominated for an Oscar. But this, the most prestigious award of all? Not a friggin’ peep. So let me be the first to say it—Paul Mescal can get it.

And by “it,” I mean of course “the world.” Normal People, which was basically the actor’s first role on-screen, landed on the BBC and Hulu at the exact right moment, which is the gross way of saying that the doomed three-way romance between his character of Connell, Daisy Edgar-Jones’ of Marianne, and Connell’s legendary gold chain, landed about two weeks before the pandemic struck. Trapped at home and feeling like we were losing our minds, Normal People resonated at that moment in time deeply—it was both escapist (these were two desperately beautiful people having a lot of sex after all) and emotionally devastating. And the world was immediately his.

And the world (of which I have in this instance deemed myself the mouthpiece) hasn’t let go since. Why would we? In every role that Mescal has acted in since he’s shone brightly, whether he was way down the call-sheet like when he made friendly with an unmoored Olivia Colman in The Lost Daughter, or front and center like he was with his shattering (and yes Oscar nominated) performance in Charlotte Wells’ immediate masterpiece Aftersun.

That role (playing Calum, a young father who’s taken his daughter on vacation while fighting some emotional demons that he only allows her brief glimpses of) along with the role Connell really cemented into place this idea of Mescal as our “sad boy king”—those gigantic watery blue orbs that he calls eyes are extremely good at breaking our hearts. But. You know. In a sexy way. Which is to say that he makes us want to protect him, and hopefully with our full bodies.

But he’s successfully tapped into other facets of masculinity too. I didn’t see him on the London stage in A Streetcar Named Desire (which is what he won his Olivier for), but I’ve seen the Marlon Brando film often enough to know that the character of Stanley Kowalski, for all of his scream-crying in the rain, is no matter how you slice him a very different kind of fellow from Mescal’s other sensitive boys.

And then there’s my favorite role of Paul’s—that of a freelance advertisement for O’Neill’s pornographically short soccer (yes, I am American) shorts, which he’s been photographed jogging to and fro in public by paparazzi more times than I can count. That kind of easy breezy confidence is all Paul, and it will hopefully be the sort of charm he’ll get to channel into the short-skirts of Ridley Scott’s forthcoming Gladiator sequel.

That bout of leering celebrity voyeurism aside, Mescal’s role in director Andrew Haigh’s forthcoming All of Us Strangers does get to bridge the two—his character of Harry is both a bit of sad boy (although his co-star Andrew Scott, giving the performance of the year, does manage to swipe Mescal’s sad boy crown this round) while also being a major injection of sex appeal and positivity. Snapping Scott’s character out of his solitary doldrums with nothing less than some phenomenally realized marathon fucking, Mescal (who this past weekend won Best Supporting Actor at the British Independent Film Awards for Strangers) twists it all up—sex and sadness—in his own exquisitely perfect way. And if crying while horny ain’t 2023 in a nutshell I don’t know what is.