Photographs by GREG WILLIAMS
Interview by GREG WILLIAMS & JANE CROWTHER

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Gladiator II’s Paul Mescal saddles up to discuss the emotional, psychological and physical ride of acting and the crucial advice Sir Ridley Scott gave him.

On a warm Saturday in July, Paul Mescal is galloping round the indoor riding school belonging to UK movie horse providers and trainers, The Devil’s Horsemen, on a beautiful dark bay 15-hander he learnt to ride for his role in Gladiator II. He nudges the horse, Duke, towards me, clicking his tongue and talking in a soothing tone looking every inch the ‘son of Rome’ that he plays in Ridley Scott’s long-awaited epic, Gladiator II. Despite his easy laugh and Gucci suit, it’s easy to imagine him charging into battle. Set two decades after the events of Scott’s 2000 film, the sequel finds Mescal’s character Lucius – the son of Connie Nielson’s Lucilla from the first movie – in hiding in the province of Numidia when the Roman Empire stages a bloody siege on the port, taking him prisoner and killing his wife. Transported to Rome as a plaything for the city’s brutal games, Lucius crosses paths with twin brother emperors Geta and Caracalla and a gladiator master, Macrinus (Denzel Washington). Driven by vengeance and survival, Lucius challenges the rot of Rome via eye-popping arena battles (rhinos! sharks!) and learns about his own backstory as he does it.  

It’s a juicy role for any actor – following Russell Crowe’s indelible performance as Maximus – and one that Mescal admits could have been daunting had he allowed it to be. He’d first watched the original film with his dad at the age of ‘12 or 13’ and it was a movie the family revered. ‘I didn’t fear it,’ he says of taking on the mantle. ‘This ties back to something Ridley said on the first day of filming when we were waiting to get going, and we were all in these little tents. He comes up, smoking a cigar, and he slaps me on the back, and goes, “Just remember, your nerves are no good to me.” I was like, “What the fuck does that mean?” What I took from it was: “This isn’t about you. So whatever legacy the film is taking, you’re actually doing it a disservice if you can’t wear that. It’s bigger than us all making the film. Just go make the film. Go play Lucius.” He might have meant a totally different thing, but I found that comment very liberating. That’s something I’ll always keep forever for big films and small ones: “Get out of your way. Let your ego sit in the corner, and go and do your job.”

Given the job after a half-hour chat with Scott (‘We spoke for about five minutes about the blueprint of Gladiator II, and then we spoke for about 25 minutes about life and Gaelic football and everything inbetween’) the Irishman got straight into training, building up his physicality to convince as a deadly fighter and learning to ride a horse, as well as complete stunts with his four-legged co-star. ‘I had one of the best trainers in the world telling me what to do, when to do it, what to eat, when to eat,’ he says of working out to get the physique that prompted his fellow actor Pedro Pascal to call him ‘Paul the wall’ on set. ‘I wanted him to feel strong. But as much as you have a team of people around you, they can’t lift the weights for you. As much as it’s a physical preparation, it’s also a psychological preparation. You’re preparing your body to be somewhat violent.’ 

Mescal also wanted to be fighting fit in the saddle. As he strokes Duke in the stables he recalls his equine experience pre-Gladiator being limited to riding – and falling off – a horse in County Clare with his uncle. ‘The thing about horses is that they’re so enjoyable and present. The minute you’ve come to a position that feels kind of dangerous, you suddenly realise that they’re 10ft or 12ft tall, and they weigh a tonne, and they’ll run through you for a short cut. It’s mad.’

The Devil’s Horsemen have worked with Scott for years and horsemaster and stunt performer Camilla Naprous took the actor to task at their Milton Keynes HQ, helping him feel comfortable around, and on, horses. ‘We did 20 to 30 hours of riding and now I’m fully in love with horses,’ Mescal smiles. He takes Duke to the indoor training area for a couple of laps of relaxed cantering as the stable’s resident dog, Bertie, follows to watch. He looks like a pro, the hours in the saddle having paid off. He admits to pushing his skills further while filming. ‘I like getting technical so when you go to shoot, you’re not nervous. If I’m going to get to set, I’m going to want to do more than we rehearsed – and the only way to do that is by spending time on it. So technically we weren’t allowed to gallop on the film, but I knew that on the day I was going to want to gallop.’ He chuckles. ‘I mean, it’s Gladiator… I’m not going to trot him down!’ 

The dark bay Lusitano 15.2-hand horse he rode in the film, Doctor (who is also the steed in the Lloyds TV adverts), is grazing in a nearby field and is brought out to Mescal as he stands in dappled sunlight under a tree. He greets him as a long lost friend; ‘This is the greatest horse on planet Earth!’ he says affectionately as he pets him. Doctor began film work on Ridley Scott’s 2014 Exodus: Gods and Kings and is retiring after his stint on Gladiator II. In one key scene in the film, Mescal races to confront his onscreen nemesis, catching Doctor by the reins and running alongside him before mounting him as he canters away. He rides the horse through a baying crowd of hundreds to the outskirts of Rome… It’s a classic movie stunt and one that he was keen to do himself. ‘It’s such a brief moment in the film but I think that’s the kind of stuff that I love. It doesn’t matter how small a moment is; all of that stuff
adds to the general texture of the film. You want to see the actors in the film doing the things that they’re setting out to do. That was a big day for me, because a lot of work had gone into it. It would have been a very public embarrassment had I cocked it up. Public shame. And probably an injury, and then the film would have to stop. If I came off the horse, Ridley said I owed him two Bentleys.’

As I watch, Mescal shows me how it’s done with a 16.3-hand grey horse that Denzel Washington rode in the film, called Caravel. In the outdoor school, he watches Caravel, mane rippling, as he canters around the edge of the enclosure. After gauging the speed, Mescal runs alongside the cantering horse, matching his pace, mirroring his gait and ultimately, making the fluid leap to the saddle, this time in Gucci and Cartier – a huge grin on his face as he rides in a circle around me. Caravel dances underneath him. ‘That is such a fucking buzz!’ he exclaims, his hand shaking with adrenaline, before asking to do it again. He’s thrilled he can still master the move months later. ‘I loved the physicality of playing Lucius,’ he says of the part. ‘I hadn’t done something like that. As much as I love independent cinema, that was always something that I wanted to do. I knew, also, I wanted to play with how an audience perceives you. I played these cerebral, heady, depressive characters – and this guy’s totally different. He’s direct and animalistic. Just a totally different texture.’

Mescal has certainly played different textures since his breakout role as Connell in Normal People put him at the top of casting wishlists. His turn as a depressed dad in Aftersun was so precise and heartfelt it took Cannes (where I first met him) by storm – and took Mescal on to the Academy Awards for a best actor nomination. His roles in The Lost Daughter and opposite Andrew Scott in All of Us Strangers also netted critical attention. As we leave The Devil’s Horsemen to travel to my home by car for lunch, we talk about the journey he’s made from being the Gaelic football player in Maynooth, County Kildare, to appearing as Jay Gatsby on stage and ultimately beginning work on Chloé Zhao’s eagerly anticipated Hamnet the Monday after this shoot.

Born to a school-teacher dad and police-officer mum, Mescal grew up ‘sporty’ and with encouraging parents who ‘never, ever said no’ to his ambitions. ‘The only limitations we had growing up were maybe financial ones. But we never felt that. And it’s probably the greatest magic trick of all time that they were able to pull where I never felt constrained by that.’ A keen Gaelic football and rugby player, Mescal swapped the field for the stage when he attended the Lir Academy in Dublin, graduating with an agent and the lead in the prestigious Gate Theatre’s adaptation of The Great Gatsby. That kick-started an informative two-year run of theatre roles before he was cast in his first screen work on the zeitgeisty Normal People in 2019.

‘The first thing I did was Normal People, and I don’t think you could wish for better material than that. I feel very lucky that I managed to kind of skip the point in people’s careers where you have to just shine in things that aren’t, maybe, as well-written. But I suppose there’s a different pressure that comes with that, because you’re in it at the deep end with material that if you’re not up to it, it will just chew you up and spit you out. That’s the great fear with any work, where the demands of a script are demanding a lot of you. If you’re not meeting the demands, you can’t hide. But that pressure is something I keep going to – I think I seek it out. The word that keeps coming to me is “capacity”. It’s jumping up on a horse, or it’s putting yourself in positions with work, or a shoot like this, for example, that’s going to the limit of something creative. When I’m working under that pressure, it switches off your ego, because you’re panicking. You’re like, “Will I survive this?” Not physically, but will you survive this pursuit, creatively?’

I ask how that panic translates when he’s working on a project. ‘There’s pockets in a play, or a film, where you’re like: “There’s going to be something big asked of me on day 12 of the shoot.” There’s certain scenes in a film where you always wish that that scene was another week away. You want to have done it, but the fear and anxiety that comes with doing something that’s going to cost you, or doing something that you don’t know you can do yet – you’re just kind of doing all the work and prep psychologically, and you’re hoping that it’ll come to you on the day. It’s a weird job where it’s not like an Olympian weightlifter where you’ve lifted those weights in your preparation for the Olympics. With acting, you’re doing all this intangible prep that you hope is going to work, and then everything goes quiet, and they’re trying to capture it, and it’s whoever you’re acting with and your neurosis. That’s when you find out. Or that’s when you’re found out.’

Whatever choices he made on Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun alongside onscreen daughter Frankie Corio were exactly the right ones – and he felt that when watching it with an audience for the first time at the Cannes Film Festival in 2022. ‘It wasn’t so much that you watch that film and go, “That’s going to take you to an Oscar nomination”,’ he recalls. ‘It was just the fact that I was so creatively fulfilled by the fact that what Charlotte, myself and Frankie set out to make, moved people in a room. I remember, I got the car back and I asked the driver to pull over. I just walked over to the promenade. I remember thinking, “This film is going to pop off”…’ 

The feeling, he says, in that moment, is one of creative contentment. ‘I think this job conditions you to be somewhat tense and conscious. You’re committed totally to something, and I don’t think that’s conducive to being content. I’ve kind of an anxious disposition so those pockets of calm and contentment – they normally follow that kind of exhale that you have when you finish a job. And that’s like heaven, that feeling. It’s so brief in comparison to what the marathon of a shoot is, or a 12-week run of a play. But that’s the pay-off.’

For someone who describes himself as ‘deeply impatient’ the calmness of contentment is sometimes at odds with his ambition, hunger and need to chase. ‘Those goal posts are always shifting, I think. I’ll do Gladiator, and then that will calm me, or give me a certain level of contentment, but if anything, it’s gone the opposite direction. You get that contentment for a week or two weeks, and then you’re like, “I want to do something else.” If I was to take two years off, I’d go mad for about six months, but then I would have to pick up something that would satiate or resemble that rhythm of being on set. Something that you can obsess over.’

Though he counts photography as one of his current obsessions – he owns and shoots with a vintage Nikon F1 – he is eager to find new characters to play. In a couple of days he’ll start work with Chloé Zhao on Hamnet in Wales. An adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s bestselling book, it tells the story of the marriage between William Shakespeare (Mescal) and his wife (Jessie Buckley) in the wake of losing their son, the titular Hamnet. The grief the couple share is partly what powers the playwright to pen Hamlet and Mescal will be riding another of The Devil’s Horsemen’s equine stars in the production. ‘Ultimately it’s quite modern in the sense that it’s the damage that losing a child has on their relationship… Like, they say 70% of marriages don’t survive the loss of a child. It’s devastating. I’m nervous to go there myself, even in a fictitious sense.’

It’s another role that will take an emotional toll on the actor, who’s aware that tonally, there’s been an intense through line in his work to date. ‘I could definitely draw a line between Normal People, Aftersun, and All of Us Strangers – in terms of tone. But the characters are very different. I think a lot of the characters that I play are suffering mentally, and they’re battling inner demons.’ That’s something Mescal can relate to. ‘I definitely have my battles with mental health, for sure,’ he nods. ‘And I’ve made no secret of that. They come and go. But, also, I don’t think that the characters that I’ve played represent my version of that, which feels more interesting to me. I think it’s important to normalise conversation around mental health because it’s so common. I’m not describing a unique experience. It’s unique to me, but it’s totally universal. And I think we’re moving towards a society where it’s OK for men to talk about their own fragility or sadness or depression or whatever word you want to call that.’

de him feel that his work is useful to viewers. ‘I feel a great sense of pride in getting to represent characters that I understand. I love acting so much, but ultimately you’re providing a service to an audience. You’re hoping that when the lights go dark in a cinema, and you’re portraying a human being, that somebody goes, “oh, that person looks like my friend” or “that person is me” or ‘maybe I do that sometimes’. And it’s a safe environment to consider those things.’

Safety is also something that’s important in work – feeling emotionally met by his co-players and being able to go to dark, emotional and psychological spaces. The 28-year-old forms lasting friendships with many of his colleagues such as his Normal People acting partner Daisy Edgar-Jones, to the delight of fans of the projects. ‘Daisy, Saoirse [Ronan], Emily [Watson],’ he nods of the bonds he’s made. ‘Jessie [Buckley], I can already tell, before we’re filming. Josh O’Connor. I’m so lucky. I’m learning as these years go on, that the great thing about those relationships is that that’s the tip of the iceberg. You know, those red-carpet moments, or taking photos with Andrew [Scott] or Saoirse or Daisy, they are – and I’m so lucky to say this – they are some of my best friends. And I think the longer I go into this career, the more I want to keep those relationships. Because they’re not like flashes in the pan. They’re as important to me as my family is, in the sense that I don’t really want to talk a huge amount about those things, because they’re mine.’

Those friendships are, he admits, even more important when the work gets so deep that it affects him. ‘Whenever I feel low, a lot of the time it’s potentially triggered by characters. It’s not to do with necessarily a Method approach. In fact, I try not to do it that way. But the first couple of times you do a scene that’s particularly traumatising for the character, I’m convinced that your brain doesn’t know that it’s fake. I find that if you’re doing that take seven or eight times, my brain starts to protect me, and it starts to tell me subconsciously, “This isn’t real.” But for the first two or three, your body is like, “What the fuck is going on?” The job is asking your brain to go into places where it can be very difficult, and that’s the only way I know how to do it. You put into it what you get out of it. It costs something to make. It’s nothing to do with this tortured idea of an actor having to lock himself in a cabin for four weeks to kind of get to this state, because that’s not how we walk around. It’s to do with those pressure days on set where you’re wondering if you’re going to get there. There’s an amazing relief that comes with having done it. But there’s also the effect of it that I feel a little bit low at the end of the day.’

Mescal wonders if other actors carry the feeling of what the character is going through in the same way, referring to a book he’s read, The Body Keeps the Score. ‘It deals a lot with veterans coming back from Vietnam and post-war stuff. The trauma is held in the body. It has to go somewhere. It goes into the body. Acting and Vietnam are very different things, but it’s all relative to your lived experience. And if my lived experience is genuine, that’s my lived experience. The only way you can sustain a career is if there’s some sort of safety in place. You’re constantly pushing to be as close to the character as you can, but your body sometimes overrides it. Thankfully your body looks after you sometimes, when you need it to. I love the way Andrew Scott talks about how your whole job is to play. It’s play. Even when it’s rough, you’re still playing it. We’re overgrown children.’

As we arrive at my house for lunch and a splash in the pond, Mescal talks about the play he got to experience on Gladiator II within Ridley Scott’s arena. At 86-years-old, the director is still as vibrant and enthusiastic about film as any debut artist. ‘He’s one of the all-time greats and he’s as in love with it now as he was 40 or 50 years ago. That’s the dream.’ It also put him toe-to-toe with Denzel Washington, at his waspish best as a charming but ruthless gladiator master who buys Lucius as a weapon and a prize. ‘I mean, you couldn’t dream that up,’ he says of acting opposite Washington. ‘To be not only in a scene with him, but to have Ridley watching it on the monitors. It’s like, “This is peak – people at the top of their game,” and you’re in the middle of it. Denzel is such an incredible actor to watch, not only on screen, but imaging being 5ft away from his face, watching him do it. It’s just a really, really exciting experience.’

And though Scott told his lead to throw his nerves out of the window, Mescal is aware that comparisons between him and Russell Crowe are inevitable. ‘The comparison is redundant because it’s two different actors with two very different characters,’ he laughs. ‘The only similarity is that the actors are both playing gladiators in and around the period of Ancient Rome. His spirit lives on in the film in a really strong sense. But I was just like: “I’m not servicing either the first or this film by focusing on that.” It’s naïve to think the comparisons won’t come, but that’s not my chair to lift.’

The film leaves space for more adventure so if audiences respond to Gladiator II, Mescal may be called back to the Colosseum (‘If Rid’s in, I’m in’) and may need to return some of the costume he took home as souvenirs. ‘I may have a couple of the pieces kept, yeah,’ he admits with a truant’s smile before he leaps off the jetty into the water with a gleeful splash. ‘Just to hang up. And then if I ever have kids or grandchildren and they need reminding that their father or grandfather was once cool, I’ll just wheel that out.’