‘Normal People’ adaptation takes sex seriously
Series based on novel has thoughtful approach to exploring intimacy
DUBLIN— Paul Mescal, battling a cold, collapsed into a chair on the edge of a busy set just outside the city here.
The Irish actor was midway through a “beast” of a day, he said, shooting the high-profile adaptation of Sally Rooney’s wildly popular novel “Normal People.”
“It’s like I’ve been thrown into the sea, never mind the deep end,” Mescal said, laughing, of his leading role playing Connell. “But I’ve been looked after by the people I’ve been working with, so I’ve been given various life rafts.”
As a young actor, just two years out of drama school, making his television debut in an eagerly anticipated adaptation by Hulu and the BBC, it’s not surprising that Mescal, 24, was experiencing a steep learning curve. But “Normal People” brings an extra degree of difficulty: the novel focuses almost exclusively on the intimate, explicitly rendered relationship between Connell and Marianne, his on-again, off-again love.
Rooney presents sexuality as a transformative, healing, complicated form of communication for both characters, and the series faithfully follows suit; both roles include full-frontal nudity in scenes of striking rawness and delicacy.
The result — 12 half-hour episodes that begin on CBC Gem on May 27 — is an unusually thoughtful and moving depiction of young people’s emotional lives. The sex between teenagers you’re likely to see on television at the moment is frequently fumbling and hilarious (“Sex Education”) or designed to shock (“Euphoria”). But in “Normal People,” the intimacy of these moments between Marianne and Connell is so distinct, especially their first time together, you almost feel like an intruder.
The production hired an intimacy co-ordinator, and thought carefully about how to translate the physical and emotional vulnerability of the book for television in a way that was respectful to both the original story and the actors performing it. The environment was warm and supportive, Daisy EdgarJones, the British actor who plays Marianne, said on set.
But she added that some of the heavier scenes had stayed with her. Filming the period when Marianne is very depressed and looking to violent sex for comfort left Edgar-Jones, 21, feeling “really strange for a few days, it’s hard not to take that stuff on.”
Overall, though, the show’s prevailing themes, as represented by Marianne and Connell’s relationship, are inspirational, she said.
“Hopefully people will watch it and learn from it how you should treat yourself,” she said,
“and how you should be treated by others.”
We meet Marianne and Connell as schoolmates in a small town in West Ireland: he is athletic, popular, working class and quietly very clever; she is wealthy, lonely and droll, wielding her intelligence like a flamethrower. Connell’s mother cleans Marianne’s large family home and the teenagers start sleeping together in secret before both heading to Dublin for college, where they spend the next few years oscillating between being friends and lovers.
“When they’re together, they’re just happy,” Mescal said. “It’s deeply frustrating when they’re not together.”
Rooney’s first novel, “Conversations With Friends,” was popular, but “Normal People,” released in Britain in 2018 and America the following year, was a sensation. It sold over 500,000 print copies in North America and over one million copies across all formats outside of the U.S., according to her publishers — huge numbers for literary fiction.
Work adapting “Normal People” into a series began before the novel had even hit bookstores. At Element Pictures,
Lenny Abrahamson (“Room”) and his producing partner Ed Guiney (“The Favourite”) had read the galley and mulled various approaches for a screen version. They settled on a halfhour TV show to suit the book’s linearity and lack of subplots.
The BBC signed on early to produce. The broadcaster had been looking for “a millennial drama series that would feel like an antidote to the bigger supernatural or sci-fi shows that are often aimed at a younger audience,” Piers Wenger, the BBC’s head of drama programming, said in a telephone interview. Hulu then came on as the U.S. distributor and producer.
Filming began last year in June; the producers wanted a quick turnaround to capitalize on the early buzz of the book’s popularity. Unlike recent literary adaptations that have used the source materials as jumping off points (“Little Women” or “The Personal History of David Copperfield”), the “Normal People” mantra on set was “the book is the Bible.”
The novel’s narrative is always told from either Connell or Marianne’s perspective, and translating that interiority and shifting viewpoint onto the screen was one of the production team’s biggest priorities — and challenges. In many scenes, this looks like obliquely cropped close-ups of characters’ faces or frames showing the backs of their heads.
“It seems like a paradox,” Abrahamson said in a telephone interview. But “if you make it harder for an audience to see quite what’s happening in a character’s face, you think your way toward them, and it feels like you really are in the room rather than in some artificial space of perfect access.”
Abrahamson wanted the book’s nuanced view of sexuality reflected onscreen. He had directed sex scenes before, but never with the nudity required for “Normal People,” and he wanted to get it right — and for his young actors to feel empowered.
Abrahamson and cinematographer Suzie Lavelle were inspired by photographer Nan Goldin, namely her work’s rich colour palette and incidental nakedness. This influence is evident in the way the leads’ full frontal nudity, specifically, is shown in moments of quiet and repose. There is little sexualization or voyeurism to be found, just shared vulnerability.
Then there is Marianne’s exploration of BDSM and submissive sex, which emerges first in the book with Connell’s certainty that “She would have lain on the ground and let him walk over her body if he wanted,” and with subsequent partners hitting her during sex. In both the novel and the show, Marianne’s experiences are consensual — if not always positive — and a key way she comes to understand herself.
Through Marianne, the show depicts the complexity of a young woman’s sexuality with empathy, even avoiding some of the book’s tendency to pathologize her desires. Onscreen, the tone of Marianne’s intimacy is an effective shorthand for communicating her state of mind as we meet her at a new point in her life, similar to the way her outfits and hairstyles change.
Edgar-Jones said she’s proud of “Normal People,” including the sex scenes, and of the fact that the nudity is “50-50” between her and Mescal.
“I’ve watched the episodes,” she added, laughing. “I’m well prepared for the bits where I have to tell my flatmates and parents to look away.”