Is Paul Mescal doomed by his own celebrity status?
As the public’s reviews of Hamnet flooded in, one talking kept coming up: why is Paul Mescal wearing a tiny little earring? It would transpire that William Shakespeare himself did, in fact, wear an earring, even though looking at the paintings now feels like it surely must be edited in. But the point still stands, and the point is this: Mescal didn’t feel like Shakespeare in the feature; he felt like Paul Mescal, in a period costume.
While Mescal’s performance as the famed playwright is, in moments, absolutely brilliant as he boils the figure down to a mere man, turning him into an anguished and flawed father who is largely a side character in this story about grief. I found myself, in the cinema, routinely falling out of it. The second he opened his mouth, I thought, ‘But he’s Irish?’ As soon as I saw the tiny earring, I thought they’d simply forgotten to take it out. In the final moments, as his character plays in his own show of Hamlet, I found myself wondering to what level Mescal already knew Shakespeare from his training.
Again, I kept falling out of it, unable to stop my mind wandering into thoughts of Mescal, the celebrity whom I seem to see more than I see my own family, and who I seem to know a lot about, like any average 20-something with a phone likely does. By the time I left the theatre, any thoughts I had on the movie faded away in the face of one big feeling: Paul Mescal may have fallen into the doom of the celebrity.
By the doom of the celebrity, I mean this. In order to be a great actor, you need to be able to disappear. A great actor isn’t present in their projects; it is merely the character, as the mission is to get the audience to suspend their belief, leave the real world behind and join the world of the movie. Even if the world of the movie is what we recognise, the audience needs to suspend their belief and buy into the feeling, believing instead that the actor is that character and is moving through those emotions.
The more well-known an actor becomes as a celebrity, the harder that vanishing act becomes.
However, it’s more nuanced than merely social status or fame. Leonard DiCaprio is one of the most famous men on the planet, yet he doesn’t seem doomed. Pondering on that example had me wondering if the problem is the modern age, if DiCaprio avoided the doom because the height of his career came at a pre-social media time, where there could be more boundaries between actors and fans, and before everything was quite so parasocial.
But then Timothée Chalamet seems to trouble that theory, given that he’s incredibly active online, does plenty of interviews, and seems eager to ensure fans know who he is as a person. Yet still, when A Complete Unknown was released, I was shocked at just how much Chalamet genuinely disappeared as Bob Dylan. When I was watching Marty Supreme, I didn’t find myself thinking, ‘This guy is dating Kylie Jenner’. I was locked in.
But during Hamnet, my mind wandered as I thought about the man, not the character, unable to even really get a view of Mescal’s performance because I was all too aware of the actor. I posed the problem to friends, and two ideas of the cause emerged.
The first: Normal People, lockdown and the obsession with Connell’s chain. When Normal People was released in 2020, Mescal shot from a completely unknown name to a superstar at a time when everyone had endless time to binge a show and endless time to scroll on their phone, digging through the archives to learn everything about Mescal. He boomed in an instant from a nobody to a leading man, skipping the tiers of side characters and extras, meaning that the sudden interest in ‘who is he’ came in an intense and concentrated tsunami. In short, Mescal was never a one to watch; he was instantly a star and instantly a celebrity as fan pages for his character’s necklace popped up, and then the next thing we know, he’s dating indie superstar Phoebe Bridgers, upping the stakes again with a high-profile relationship.
The second theory works in tandem with that as a missed solution. Mescal’s next major role came in Aftersun. From watching him cry as a depressed student, we moved to him crying as a depressed father, and I think that’s when the jail was locked.
“I don’t think I’m sad. I’m a little bored of it, to be honest. Yeah. Because it’s not true,” Mescal told GQ as more and more the actor himself was categorised as a ‘Sad boy’, but really, it’s a fate he caused himself with a run of movies all playing lost and lonely men, grappling with mental illness and grief.
In 2024, perhaps his decision to star in Gladiator II, despite always claiming he had no real interest in big blockbusters, was an attempt to undo that, but even still, Lucius Verus has all the same signs of a tortured man, even if he is swinging a sword, and so even despite the big budget and the different setting, it still felt like Paul Mescal playing what was simply being taken as Paul Mescal; the sad boy.
In the time since Mescal emerged, Chalamet, on the other hand, has been a cannibal, a Shakespearean king, a stoner kid, a hopeless romantic, a chocolate factory owner, and much more. It’s impossible to pin Chalamet down or trap him as simply himself because he keeps switching it up.
I feel sad to ask the question, ‘Is it too late?’ Mescal himself seems more than aware of these traps as he’s removed himself from social media and spoken often in interviews about how he believes people knowing too much about an actor impacts movie-making, but that exact fate hit him. Mescal became a celebrity, and now it’s hard to believe him in a role because all we can think is, ‘but that man is Irish, and he’s dating Gracie Abrams’.
One friend suggested that maybe the solution is this: a comedy. Perhaps Mescal needs to fully shatter form to free himself again, but at present, he’s too busy prepping to play Paul McCartney, a casting role that sparked outrage because of exactly this problem.
