Paul Mescal Loves the Twists of All of Us Strangers and Foe — But Some Reactions Make Him Want to Scream

This feature discusses the endings of the films All of Us Strangers and Foe.

I’m making a habit, in a good way, of getting to promote the films that I love—but also not being available to talk endlessly about them.” Paul Mescal tells me this from afar, on the set of the biggest movie of his career, Gladiator 2. He’d been in production on Ridley Scott’s upcoming blockbuster sequel when the SAG-AFTRA strike began last summer. Then came the long hiatus. During that industry-wide shutdown, Mescal’s two major 2023 movies, Searchlight’s All of Us Strangers and Amazon’s Foe, premiered in Telluride and New York, respectively, launching major fall campaigns. The end of the strike brought Mescal to the US in November for a flurry of press and panels for both films. He didn’t stay in LA long, though: By early December, he was back filming in Malta.

If that progression sounds a little rushed, Mescal is pleased with the way it turned out. The Oscar- and Emmy-nominated Irish actor has seen his star rise very quickly since his 2020 breakout in Hulu’s Normal People, earning a best-actor Oscar nod last year for Charlotte Wells’s little-indie-that-could, the father-daughter drama Aftersun. Accordingly, Mescal’s 2023 movies were highly anticipated, carrying expectations he wasn’t used to. He loved seeing Strangers meet rave reviews out of Telluride over Labor Day weekend, matching his confidence that Andrew Haigh’s ghostly love story would land with both critics and audiences. And he took the far less positive responses to the sci-fi-tinged Foe in stride, following its muted New York debut. (For a sense of the sheer gap between the two, Strangers sits at 94% on Rotten Tomatoes, while Foe, which costars Saoirse Ronan, is at 24%.)

“Something that I’m learning about myself and my taste is that I want people to have really strong opinions—so much, sometimes, that I want to scream,” Mescal says. “It stings a bit when people are talking about [Foe] in a certain context, but that’s just the fact of what making films is…. If I’m lucky enough to have a career that spans it, you want to make choices that are polarizing, because that means the material is innately challenging.” He adds of Foe, “I have zero reservations about the process of making that film.”

Mescal continues to absorb the responses to the two films since they’re only now meeting wider audiences—Strangers began a platform theatrical release around Christmas, and Foe started streaming on Prime Video last week—and they both position Mescal’s characters at the center of game-changing, final-act twists. These surprise endings upend our perception of who we understand Mescal to be playing, exactly: Foe blurs the lines between humanity and artificial intelligence in its exploration of a decaying marriage in post-apocalyptic America, while Strangers blurs the living and the dead in its portrait of a lonely screenwriter (Andrew Scott) meeting a new love interest (Mescal) while reuniting with his long-dead parents (Jamie Bell and Claire Foy).

Mescal’s performances in both films hardly betray these teases of unreality, but they still brim with life, filled as they are with heartbreak and desire. He’s never signaling a gimmick, in line with the movies’ character-driven focus. “Playing a projection was something that I could understand from reading the film, but the minute I read it, I was like, ‘I can’t,’” Mescal says of Strangers. “It’s like, ‘What am I going to do, ghost acting?’ I can’t do that. I’d be too embarrassed.” While he and his cast have been uniformly praised, the final scene—a metaphysical expression of the power of love—has been relatively divisive. Mescal still feels frustrated by some of the reactions.

“People who really respond to it kind of throw the rationale out the window, which is the way to encounter the film—it’s not about looking for what’s real and what isn’t,” he says. “If you watch All of Us Strangers and you become fixated by the reality, you’ve just missed the film! If you’re concerned about, ‘Oh, I feel robbed,’ then you’ve reduced it down to that fact as what the film is about—and it’s not about that.”

That Mescal gets so animated here speaks to his passion for the work—and not only his personal role in it, but in making films he hopes to take pride in. He looks back so fondly on Foe, for instance, because of the space that director Garth Davis gave him to try something different, and of the sheer force Ronan offered as a screen partner. “It’s like: Plant your feet, play the stakes and see what happens to your body…in that kind of traditionally masculine template of a leading man character,” he says of what felt fresh to him. “[And Saoirse] is like an animal. She works so unbelievably hard for somebody who could rest on her laurels in terms of the body of work that she’s generated and will continue to generate…. Working with her was an immense professional privilege, and we’ve become really close since.”

Mescal also got really close with his Strangers costar, Andrew Scott, over the course of filming, a development that became clear during their dizzying media blitz that immediately followed the strike. The internet has duly taken note of just how well they seemed to get along—and indeed, Mescal now considers himself and Scott friends “for life.” He notes that this was his first time completing a press tour with another adult actor: Interviews for Normal People were all virtual due to the pandemic, while his Aftersun PR partner was the child actor Frankie Corio. “This was doing it with a fully grown adult who is just a ball of joy—and it was the first time where I was like, ‘This whole press thing isn’t so bad!’” Mescal says. “Getting stupid with Andrew is really fun, and it is satisfying to articulate what a friendship means to you outside of a project that has heavy undertones.”

Going back to when I first met Mescal a year ago during the Aftersun campaign, the actor has now spent at least a year boosting Scott’s performance as one for the ages. He plans to continue banging that drum. “One thing that I pride myself on is, I think I know what good acting is, and what Andrew does in our film is beyond good acting. It’s so unbelievably exposed and raw and light and dextrous,” he says. “I’m speaking as somebody who’s admired his work for the longest time—but this to me, without a shadow of a doubt, is his career-best work to date.”

Mescal’s choices opposite Scott feel special, too, in the way he balances buoyancy with tragedy and opens himself up so completely to his role’s emotional torment. Between Strangers and Foe—to say nothing of his Olivier-winning stage run of A Streetcar Named Desire from the top of 2023—he’s pushing himself to take risks, to not do the same thing twice. “It’s an opportunity to go big, and I wanted to go big with it,” as he puts it. The desire to not get stuck appears at the forefront of his mind. So given where he is right now, does the same go for Gladiator?

“We’re nearly there now—we’re going to finish it shortly—and yeah, I’m trying to not think about what the release of that is going to look like for me personally, and what it means for me on a professional level,” he says. “It’s just impossible to articulate in terms of the scope and size…. But in terms of what my performance is in it, I don’t think it’s something that people will expect from me—which is always a nice position to be in.”

Original article written by David Canfield on 09 January '24