The director Paul Mescal wants to be the Martin Scorsese to his Robert De Niro
Many great director-actor pairings have been responsible for creating some absolute cinematic classics over the years, their steady and understanding relationship with each other allowing them to truly fulfil their potential.
There’s nothing quite like meeting someone who seems to be on a very similar creative wavelength, your discussions becoming an endless flow of ideas that you know could actually turn into something real and exciting, which has resulted in some iconic duos pairing up such as Sofia Coppola with Kirsten Dunst, David Lynch with Kyle MacLachlan, Alfred Hitchcock with James Stewart, and of course, Martin Scorsese with Robert De Niro.
The pair first collaborated on Mean Streets, the movie that took Scorsese from being a B-movie director working with Roger Corman to a viable New Hollywood icon, and by the time they’d done Taxi Driver together, both the pair’s partnership and their status in Hollywood had been cemented. Subsequently, more collaborations soon followed, including the Oscars’ hit Raging Bull and the gangster classic Goodfellas.
While Scorsese found another muse in Leonardo DiCaprio during the early 2000s, leading to six feature film collaborations (which began with 2002’s Gangs of New York), he has still retained a close partnership with De Niro, making them one of modern Hollywood’s most indomitable duos.
For Irish star Paul Mescal, whose career has gone from sausage adverts to Hollywood blockbusters, he has his heart set on his own iconic director-actor relationship, although he has only made one movie with his own Scorsese to his De Niro so far.
The Gladiator II actor rose to prominence with his emotionally-charged performance as Connell in the popular series Normal People, which paved the way for his casting in various complex roles requiring great depth. While he found praise with The Lost Daughter and God’s Creatures, it was his third-ever feature film role in Aftersun that proved to be a pivotal moment in his acting career.
Directed by Charlotte Wells in her feature debut, Mescal played the role of Calum, the father of 11-year-old Sophie, whom he takes on holiday to Turkey, where he spends the trip grappling with severe depression. It’s a proper tearjerker that saw him tapping into the role of a downtrodden and despondent father with precision, which unsurprisingly landed him an Oscar nomination, although he lost out to Brendan Fraser for The Whale.
Regardless of the loss, the role was a life-changing one for Mescal, who was able to elevate himself from a celebrated TV actor to an impressive cinematic talent capable of competing against the likes of other Hollywood stars. The actor has since kept himself busy with roles in the likes of the Oscar-nominated Hamnet and the upcoming Beatles biopics (playing Paul McCartney, no less), so it appears that he will need to clear a bit of time in his schedule if he wants to reunite with Wells.
While he told GQ about his desire to have a “De Niro–Scorsese relationship” with Wells, it seems like it’ll be some time before we see Mescal appear in anything else besides these Beatles movies, which will be released as a series of four features. After such a mighty cinematic event, however, going back to Wells’ arena of indie filmmaking will probably be a welcome change.
