I fibbed my way to fame, says star of BBC’s Normal People
HE IS the breakout star of the BBC’s new teenage sex drama Normal People – but actor Paul Mescal has admitted he only got the part after fibbing to producers.
Although his character, Connell Waldron, is often seen behind the wheel of a car, he kept quiet about the fact he couldn’t drive when he landed the career-making role.
‘My agent was like, “We are not losing this job over you not being able to drive so I’ll tell production that you can and, in the meantime, you go off and rattle through as many lessons as you can,” ’ he told Entertainment Weekly magazine.
The white lie clearly paid off – but it was not the first time that the 24-year-old had been economical with the truth.
He also confessed to fibbing to his drama-school teachers after defying their ban on students playing contact sports in case an injury ruined their acting prospects.
But Mescal, who was 18 at the time, was also a talented Gaelic footballer who played for County Kildare under-21s. He admitted: ‘I wasn’t ready to drop football.’
However, misfortune struck. ‘I went to catch the ball and I got a forearm across the jaw,’ he recalled, describing a brutal clash that left him with a fractured jaw.
‘I had to rehearse on the Monday with my jaw shut and I had to tell everyone in college that I had been working in Maxol [a petrol station] and that I had been mugged behind the till. My deep, dark secret was that I was playing football,’ he told the Irishman Abroad podcast.
Despite this, Mescal graduated from the Lir Academy in Dublin three years ago and has already been signed up by the powerful Hollywood agency CAA, whose roster includes George Clooney, Brad
Pitt and Tom Cruise. In Normal People he plays a working-class student in an intense relationship with the well- heeled Marianne, played by Daisy Edgar-Jones.
Based on Sally Rooney’s 2018 novel, the drama has been praised for its authentic take on sexuality.
But director Lenny Abrahamson said there was less nudity on set than its frequent bedroom scenes might suggest. ‘Although it all feels continuous to the eye when all put together, the actors will be wearing clothing from sometimes the shoulders down, and when you are [filming] the top and it’s just the torso, the bottoms are completely covered.’