Normal People star Daisy’s real boyfriend has a neck chain too!
The surprise star of Normal People? A silver neck chain with 118,000 followers on Instagram. And guess what...
IT COULD be a scene from the smash hit BBC drama Normal People, as actress Daisy Edgar-Jones strolls hand-in-hand with a strapping man sporting a silver chain.
But don’t be fooled by that necklace – the chap gazing into Daisy’s eyes isn’t her on-screen lover Connell, but her real-life boyfriend, actor Tom Varey.
Normal People has attracted millions of fans, all of whom are captivated by the highly charged relationship between Daisy’s character Marianne and Connell, played by Paul Mescal.
And the fascination about their complicated love affair at school and then during their time at university in Dublin has, bizarrely, been matched by the interest in the silver chain that Connell always wears.
The necklace, bought from high street catalogue store Argos, even has its own Instagram account with 118,000 followers – and a Twitter page with the hashtag #connellschain.
But a penchant for silver chains is not the only striking similarity between Tom and the man who plays Daisy’s lover. Both are 5ft 11in and have blue eyes. And both men are sporty – Tom lists football as an interest on his Facebook page, while Paul was a talented GAA player who gave up the sport for an acting career.
In fact, he studied acting at The Lir National Academy of Dramatic Art which is part of Trinity College – the university attended by Connell and Marianne in Normal People. In the series, Marianne is the daughter of a wealthy lawyer and lives in a house cleaned by Connell’s mother, Lorraine.
Daisy enjoyed a similarly comfortable, middle-class upbringing in leafy Muswell Hill in London. Her father, Phillip, is a successful TV executive and she went to the £18,000-a-year Mount School for Girls before doing her A-Levels at Woodhouse College in Finchley, north London. Tom, 29, played Cley Cerwyn in Game Of Thrones and has also appeared in BBC1’s The Village and the Channel 4 drama Ackley Bridge.
He has been dating Daisy, 21, for two years – the pair met on the set of Pond Life, a low-budget 2018 movie.
Wearing a blue and white striped T-shirt beneath a denim jacket, jeans and a red hat, Tom smiled adoringly at his girlfriend this week as they sauntered down the street in London.
According to friends, their life has been transformed in recent weeks due to the phenomenal success of Normal People and the controversy over the 12-part drama’s explicit, but delicately portrayed, sex scenes. The pair are isolating together during the coronavirus outbreak with another couple.
By contrast, 24-year-old Paul, from Kildare, is living alone in a flat in London, with not even Connell’s chain to keep him company – he has revealed he gave it to Daisy as a ‘wrap present’ when filming on Normal People finished. Reflecting on the huge level of interest in the necklace, Paul said in an interview with The Times magazine yesterday: ‘Personally, I’ve worn a chain for years. So I was like,“Jesus, have I been sexy this whole time?”
‘I think maybe the chain thing is that it’s this absolute crystallisation of him. It’s not something that would fit the identities of any other characters in the show.’