Rising stars

The breakout performers of 2020…

Before 26 April, Daisy Edgar-Jones and Paul Mescal were just actors in their early twenties, trying to get work. You might have recognised her – she was in Cold Feet and War Of The Worlds. All he’d done was BBC’s animated series Bump.

Then BBC Three’s 12-part miniseries based on Sally Rooney’s 2018 novel Normal People dropped, tracking the on-off relationship of Marianne Sheridan (Edgar-Jones) and Connell Waldron (Mescal) from the last days of secondary school in County Sligo to Dublin’s Trinity College and beyond. It was not a show you watched, but rather experienced. It was not a hit, but a phenomenon. In no time at all, Normal People had racked up 30m viewing requests on iPlayer, tripling previous recordsetting numbers set by Killing Eve. The chain that Connell wore around his neck had its own Instagram account – @connellschain – with 180,000 followers.

Normal People was beautifully written and directed (six episodes apiece by Lenny Abrahamson and Hettie Macdonald), but it was the subtlety and the honesty with which its leads dug into their characters’ complicated lives that held viewers spellbound. That and their radioactive chemistry… though the love scenes weren’t always so sensual on set.

“We were shooting an intimate scene,” says Mescal. “They put on a lot of fake sweat and we were shifting positions, and the way our bodies were in contact, it made a noise like a fart.” Edgar-Jones grins. “The crew thought one of us had actually farted and they were being really polite.”

Because Normal People landed in lockdown, the pair have largely experienced their newfound fame in isolation: “We’re just in our front bedrooms,” shrugged Edgar-Jones during yet another Zoom interview. But they’re too good to not be household names for years. He will next be seen in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s drama The Lost Daughter alongside Olivia Colman, Dakota Johnson and Jessie Buckley, while she’s signed on for the social thriller Fresh with Sebastian Stan and will lead the film adaptation of Where The Crawdads Sing (produced by Reese Witherspoon).

Looks like being globally known movie stars is their new Normal.