PAUL MESCAL ENTERS THE ARENA

The shorts get shorter. The roles get bolder. The fans grow ever more ravenous. Now Paul Mescal is trading his indie tears for blockbuster blood as the centerpiece of Ridley Scott's Gladiator II.

- Gabriella Paiella

On a midsummer evening in London's Victoria Park, the sun is expending its final burst of energy. The emerald lawn stretches as far as the eye can see, an oasis of green in the city, a vision of-ah, shit, it's starting to rain.

Paul Mescal is unfazed. He guides us under a sturdy tree, where a canopy of leaves protects us from the worsening showers, the air thick with petrichor. Mescal, reigning king of earthy and emotional heartthrobs, lounges out on the grass like some kind of Impressionist painting.

Very rarely in life does it crystallize in the actual moment that a not-insignificant number of people would kill-I mean, commit actual human murder-to be in your shoes.

To get to the park, we've power walked along Regent's Canal, one of the Irish actor's favored running routes since he put down roots in London. The canal is lined with houseboats, their inhabitants grilling or having a drink on deck. Labradors playing fetch belly flop into the water. The whole tableau is almost illegally charming.

Though Mescal has, in 2024, done to shorts inseams around the world what global warming has done to sea levels, today he's wearing full-length jeans, a salmon Patagonia long-sleeve shirt, and black Adidas Sambas. He has a soft mullet haircut, shaggy facial hair, heavy-lidded blue eyes, and a nose that could not be more Roman if it were wearing a toga and refusing to pick up its city's trash. He sports, per usual, a small hoop in one ear. In a few days' time, Mescal will begin filming Chloé Zhao's adaptation of the best-selling 2020 novel Hamnet, in which he portrays another famous man with a dangly earring: William Shakespeare.

"My right ear was pierced, so I had to get this one pierced for Shakespeare. In the portraiture, it's on the left side," he explains. "I was like, Are you fucking joking?" (He obliged.)