The original version of this article was written by Jess Bacon and published on 31 May 2024.
Paul Mescal rose to fame after the release of the BBC’s adaptation of Sally Rooney’s Normal People in 2020 and has never looked back. Since then, the Irish actor has gone on to star in some of Ireland and Britain’s best independent feature films and even made the jump to Hollywood with Ridley Scott’s Gladiator II in 2024.
With his turn as William Shakespeare, in Chloe Zhao’s devastating Hamnet, currently earning the young star yet more acclaim and award season nominations, what better time to look back on the roles that got him here.
Use this guide to find out where to watch Paul Mescal's best movies and TV shows, which are ranked below in ascending order. Plus, all the latest offers for his movies on streaming platforms like Disney+, Netflix, Prime Video and elsewhere.
10. History of Sound (2025)
Mescal might find it lazy and frustrating, but it’s difficult not to think of Brokeback Mountain while watching The History of Sound. If you’re a fan of Ang Lee’s masterpiece, however, there’s every chance you’ll enjoy it—just don’t expect a movie on quite the same level. A closer comparison might be Cold Mountain, another period-set love story in which music and song are just as important as the words being spoken.
Oliver Hermanus’s follow-up to Living—a wonderful, Kazou Ishiguro-scripted reimagining of Kurosawa's Ikuru—didn’t exactly set the world on fire at its Cannes premiere in 2025, but working alongside Josh O'Connor, Mescal does fine work with a challenging role. He also gets to wear some tiny glasses, which is a big plus.
9. Foe (2023)
Foe remains something of an outlier in the Mescal canon: a psychological, sci-fi thriller that’s not a million miles off some melancholy episodes of Black Mirror, or the recent Adam Sandler movie, Spaceman. It did, however, offer the opportunity to work with Saoirse Ronan, the biggest Irish star of her generation—which was something he was never going to turn down.
It's safe to say, Garth Davis’s movie was a little too bleak for some viewers, but the chance to see these two work together makes it well worth a watch—especially if you can't wait to see them as Paul and Linda in Sam Mendes' upcoming Beatles movies.
8. Gladiator II (2024)
Gladiator II is the kind of sequel that takes the most successful elements of the original and turns up the dial. You could compare it to other legacy movies like The Force Awakens or Blade Runner 2049, but Ridley Scott’s follow-up never comes close to capturing the same magic he achieved with Russell Crowe in the original.
Some of the blame is possibly due to Mescal’s casting: the actor has physical presence and intensity to burn, but he hasn't got Crowe's unique ability for endearing grandiosity—indeed, very few people have. No matter, Gladiator II a perfectly enjoyable movie on its own terms, and it’s fascinating to see such an interior actor attempt to translate those abilities to such a wide canvas.
7. Carmen (2022)
Carmen is probably Mescal’s least seen project, but if you like the idea of watching the actor dance and sing (as we will apparently get to see again, one day in the distant future, in Richard Linklater’s Merrily We Roll Along), then this is one you might want to seek out.
For his debut feature, the dance choreographer Benjamin Millepied (who, amongst other things, created the sandwalk for Villeneuve’s Dune) reimagines the Bizet opera in present-day Mexico, with Mescal giving a physical performance alongside Melissa Barrera as two doomed lovers.
6. God’s Creatures (2022)
With two films premiering in Cannes, 2022 proved to be another landmark year for Mescal. The first to screen was Saela Davis and Anna Rose Holmer’s God’s Creatures, an Irish-set drama starring Emily Watson as Aileen, the manager of a seafood processing plant on the West Coast. It’s a dark and brooding movie, somewhere in the vein of Calvary and Banshees of Inisherin, but with none of those movies’ inherent dark humour.
Mescal gives a fascinating performance as Aileen’s son, a young man who mysteriously returns from Australia and is soon accused of assault—the question that lingers is how long Aileen will decide to swallow his side of the story.
5. The Lost Daughter (2021)
In 2021, Mescal made his feature film debut in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Lost Daughter, a movie that received Academy Award nominations for its lead actresses Olivia Coleman and Jesse Buckley—and if you’re a fan of their work in movies like The Favourite or I’m Thinking of Ending Things, you’ll want to see what happens when they share the screen here.
Similar to Creatures, Gyllenhaal’s movie focuses on the dark secrets of a small community, but Mescal’s role is far more sympathetic. He even gets to do a little bit of polite flirting with Coleman, which is obviously worth the ticket price alone.
4. All of Us Strangers (2023)
Andrew Scott got more of the plaudits for Andrew Haigh’s supernatural romance, All of Us Strangers, but Mescal’s supporting performance was just as strong—and needless to say, if you liked Haigh’s landmark queer movie Weekend or similarly heartbreaking movies, like Celine Song’s Past Lives, get ready to ball your eyes out with this one.
For his role as Harry, Mescal gives the movie an electric charge, taking on an impeccable Leeds accent and committing to several wonderfully intimate scenes. For this performance, Mescal was nominated for a Bafta for Best Supporting Actor and was unlucky not to do the same at the Oscars—even if nobody was beating Robert Downey Jr. for Oppenheimer that year.
3. Hamnet (2025)
With The History of Sound and Gladiator II not landing with critics and audiences quite as well as expected, there was some pressure on Chloe Zhao’s Hamnet to hit the ground running—but as its win for Best Drama at the Golden Globes recently showed, it's being received by most (if not all) viewers with open arms. Adapted from Maggie O’Farrell’s bestseller, this is the kind of heart-wrenching period movie that only comes around every once in a while—think The Remains of the Day, Little Women and Portrait of a Lady on Fire.
Zhao’s movie reunites Mescal and Jessie Buckley as William and Agnes Shakespeare and focuses on the tragic death of their son. At time of writing, it stands as second favourite for Best Picture at the Oscars.
2. Normal People (2020)
Mescal was an up-and-comer on the Dublin theatre scene before landing the role of Connell Waldren in the 2020 miniseries Normal People, a role that stunned audiences across the globe and changed the young actor’s life. Based on Sally Rooney’s best-seller, Normal People is a beautifully moving, wonderfully directed and consistently heartbreaking account of young love that fans of the Netflix series One Day, and anyone else with a heart, will immediately warm to.
The show was nothing short of a sensation, and a lot of that was to do with the performances of Daisy Edgar-Jones and Mescal, the latter of whom went on to win a BAFTA for Best Actor and secure a Primetime Emmy nomination.
1. Aftersun (2022)
The second of Mescal’s Cannes premieres in 2022 was Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun, a movie that came into the festival with little fanfare and ended up being voted by some reputable publications as the best movie of the year. This is one for fans of heart-wrenching coming-of-age movies like Call Me By Your Name and Moonlight—another entry in the canon of deeply personal, honest and melancholy filmmaking, and an incredibly beautiful one, too.
Mescal’s performance as a young, troubled, single father remains, at least for now, the standout moment in an already exceptional career—a role that earned him his first nomination for Best Actor at the Academy Awards. I’m certain it won’t be his last.
