The original version of this article was written by Jess Bacon and published on 31 May 2024.Paul Mescal is an Irish actor who rose to fame in the BBC’s adaptation of Sally Rooney’s Normal People and has never looked back. Since then, Mescal has gone on to star in some of Britain’s best independent feature films and even made the jump to Hollywood with Ridley Scott’s Gladiator II in 2024. With his wildly acclaimed turn in Chloe Zhao’s Hamnet being a serious player in the 2025 awards season, what better time to look back on all the roles that got him to this point?
Use this guide to find out where to watch Paul Mescal's best movies and TV shows, which are ranked 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—so if you’re a fan of Ang Lee’s masterpiece or Mona Fastvold’s The World to Come, there’s every chance you’ll enjoy it. Maybe 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—his wonderful Kazou Ishiguro-scripted Kurosawa update—didn’t exactly set the world on fire at its Cannes premiere, but Mescal does his best 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 the more melancholy episodes of Black Mirror, or the recent Sandler movie Spaceman. At the same time, the opportunity to work with Saoirse Ronan, the biggest Irish star of her generation, is something he was never going to turn down.
In the end, Garth Davis’s movie was a little too bleak for most viewers, but the chance to see these two work together makes it well worth your time.
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 and Blade Runner 2049, but Ridley Scott’s follow-up never quite captures the same magic as what he achieved with Russell Crowe in 2000.
Some of the blame is possibly due to Mescal’s casting: the actor has physical presence and intensity to burn, but he lacks Crowe’s ability for endearing grandiosity. No matter, it’s a perfectly fine movie on its own terms, and it’s fascinating to see such an interior actor attempt to translate his 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 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 created the sandwalk for Villeneuve’s Dune) reimagines the Bizet opera in present-day Mexico, with Mescal giving a remarkably physical performance alongside Melissa Barrera as the (spoiler) two doomed lovers.
6. God’s Creatures (2022)
2022 was another landmark year for Mescal, who had two films premiering in Cannes. The first 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’ 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 believe 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 the two greats together 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 is an electric presence, 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—both were won by Robert Downey Jr. for Oppenheimer.
3. Hamnet (2025)
With The History of Sound and Gladiator II not landing with critics and audiences quite as well as expected, there was a little pressure on Chloe Zhao’s Hamnet to hit the ground running—but my word, has it done that. 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. Both actors are already looking nailed on for various awards nominations, maybe even the big ones…
2. Normal People (2020)
Mescal was a regular in Dublin’s theatre scene before landing the role of Connell Waldren in the 2020 miniseries Normal People, the 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, 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 was Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun, a movie that came into the festival with little fanfare and ended up being voted by some publications as the best movie of the year. This is one for fans of great coming-of-age movies like Call Me By Your Name and Moonlight. Be warned, it’s a deeply melancholy and personal act of artistic expression, but an incredibly beautiful one too.
Mescal’s performance as a young, troubled father has, at least for now, become his standout role, earning him his first nomination for Best Actor at the Academy Awards. I’m certain it won’t be his last.
