Not thinking of becoming a Peaky Blinder are you, Paul?
Heart-throb Mescal and Crown star O’Connor rock flat cap look for new forbidden love drama
WITH their flat caps and slick three-piece suits you could be forgiven for thinking that the brutal gangland series Peaky Blinders had blagged itself some handsome new stars.
But Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor were filming a period drama with something more romantic in mind.
Maynooth actor Mescal, who won a Bafta for his role in Normal People, and O’Connor, who played Prince Charles in The Crown, will star as men who fall in love in the shadow of the World War I.
Lionel and David, who meet at music college, embark on a project to record the lives, voices and music of their friends and countrymen, and in the process forge a forbidden bond.
Based on a prize-winning novella, The History Of Sound, by US author Ben Shattuck, the film is being shot in New Jersey.
Director Oliver Hermanus said that Mescal, 28, and O’Connor, 33 – photographed last week sharing a joke between takes – were ‘on fire’ in the roles.
‘They’re great friends,’ he added. ‘They love working together.’
Both have previously taken on parts as gay men in other projects. Before he starred in The Crown, O’Connor’s breakthrough role was in romantic drama God’s Own Country.
And Mescal’s latest film, the widely acclaimed All Of Us Strangers, is a romance about two men living in a deserted tower block who strike up a relationship. Mescal, who is straight, has defended being cast as gay, saying: ‘When performances have been deemed offensive, it’s when actors are attempting to play a sexuality.
‘They contain so much more than that, and that’s what I like to find in this story. Not just as a queer love story but as a love story in general.’
‘They’re friends. They love working together’