Paul Mescal names his favourite film of the “past 10 years”
A graduate of The Lir Academy in Dublin, actor Paul Mescal rose to fame following the success of Normal People. Since then, he’s gone from strength to strength, dividing his time between stage productions like The Almeida’s A Streetcar Named Desire and film roles in The Lost Daughter and Aftersun, which debuted at Cannes Film Festival and won him an Oscar nomination for ‘Best Actor’. Here, Mescal discusses one of his favourite films of the last decade.
Back in 2022, Mescal was invited to sit down with A. Frame to discuss some of the films that have inspired him. Considering his recent role in Streetcar, it feels appropriate that he selected Elia Kazan’s 1951 adaptation of the Tenessee Williams play starring, you guessed it, Marlon Brando.
“I saw it in that formative drama school period, watching Marlon Brando kind of reinvent the wheel and do something that I don’t think had been truly done before,” Mescal explained. “I feel like James Dean started a conversation around naturalism, and then Brando ran with it. It’s just such a wonderful expression of toxicity in a way that is alluring and exciting to watch.”
After selecting several other classics, including 1993’s Remains of The Day starring Anthony Hopkins (“It’s such a masterful performance”), Mescal discussed his favourite film of the last decade: László Nemes’ Son of Saul. “László Nemes is a wonderful director. It’s my favourite film of the last ten years. It’s just a masterpiece. I recently got to work with the DP [Mátyás Erdély] who shot Son of Saul, and the first 10 minutes of that are where I feel like a super talented actor meets director meets DP — which only can happen in film. A different kind of alchemy happens on stage. But that first 10 minutes, I remember my jaw being on the ground and being like, ‘This is a masterpiece.’ And, really, trigger warning. It’s really upsetting. It’s a Holocaust film that is pretty brutal.”
Son of Saul is certainly not for the faint-hearted. It tell the story of Saul Ausländer, a Jewish Hungarian prisoner of Auschwitz who works as a Sonderkommando, salvaging valuables from massacred Jewish prisoners and cleaning the gas chambers in preparation for the next group of victims. In a particularly brutal scene, Saul witnesses a Nazi doctor suffocate a Jewish boy who hasn’t succumbed to the gas, at which point he resolves to give the child a proper Jewish burial.
You can check out the trailer below.
