Right here’s the place I discover one other distinction from the final time we talked 4 years in the past. Again then, he was experiencing that first bloom of fame, and all that got here with it, and appeared noticeably tense about it. Now, he won’t adore it—positively doesn’t adore it—however he’s discovered to be extra outwardly sanguine. “Higher that anyone has a robust opinion about you relatively than no opinion in any respect, even when it’s fallacious,” Mescal says. “You realize who you’re behind closed doorways, and that’s the non-public bit that must be protected.”
He retains his circle of mates shut, a lot of them from rising up or former costars like Daisy Edgar-Jones and Saoirse Ronan. (Whereas we’re speaking, Josh O’Connor and Andrew Scott, who’ve individually performed his homosexual lovers in movies, ship him a selfie of the 2 of them collectively.)
Even when he doesn’t have public social media accounts, it doesn’t imply he’s not scrolling. Again final winter, there have been rumors, infected through TikTok movies, that Mescal would have one-night stands, take them for walks within the park the subsequent day, level out a chicken or a tree, after which take off operating in one other path.
“Ohhhhhhh,” he moans, head in his fingers, once I deliver it up. He stays there for some time, stomach laughing and turning purple. “Fucking hell!”
These movies first got here out across the holidays when he was together with his siblings. “We have been wanting on the movies and we have been pissing ourselves at it. Categorically unfaithful. And we have been laughing, laughing, laughing, laughing,” he says. “And the one factor that upset me was that I used to be within the kitchen, I bear in mind my mum wanting on the movies and she or he was getting upset. Isn’t that devastating? I used to be like, Oh, it’s humorous to us—my brother, me, my sister—as a result of we all know that that is the way in which the web works. It’s hilarious. If it was true, it’d be fucking unhealthy, however as a rumor, it’s humorous. Then I used to be like, Oh, if you happen to’re a mom, her impulse is to come back out and be like, ‘He wouldn’t do that.’ ”
We snort some extra and we transfer on, however then we spherical our approach again to the topic as a result of he’s nervous. That it got here up in any respect, that he responded in any approach that would have fanned the flames.