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Good news for fans who like a Paul Mescal tearjerker: He’s not necessarily done with so-called sad roles.
The Irish actor, 29 — whose resume includes emotional turns in the new movies Hamnet and The History of Sound as well as 2020’s Normal People and 2023’s All of Us Strangers — recently told Vanity Fair he was contemplating moving away from the kinds of characters he played in those projects.
“I don’t know if I’ll have more to say with roles like Will or Lionel or Connell or Harry,” he told the outlet, referencing his roles in those four projects. “I recognize that they are in conversation with each other, and there’s obviously some sort of artistic compulsion that I feel to be in that territory. I don’t know if I’m finished with that yet, but I might be finished with that?”
Asked about that comment during a recent chat with PEOPLE at a Hamnet event, Mescal joked, “Don’t ever quote me on the things that I quote myself on.”
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“I think we can get used to kind of compartmentalizing actors into, ‘Oh, they do comedy or they do drama or they do one thing or another,’ ” he added.
“I just hope to keep making work that feels honest to me, and this film feels very truthful,” he continued.
Hamnet tells the story of William Shakespeare (Mescal), and his relationship with wife Agnes (Jessie Buckley), who meet, fall in love and start a family.
After their son Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe) dies, Shakespeare throws himself into work and processes his grief by staging the tragedy Hamlet. Oscar winner Chloe Zhao directs the film, which also stars Joe Alwyn and Emily Watson.
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“The only reason that this film is sad is because there’s real joy and levity in it in the first half of the film, and I think it’s kind of a bigger point,” said Mescal.
He added that the movie, which is earning rave reviews and getting Oscar buzz, is “probably the film that I’m proudest of.”
He and costar Buckley shared a unique connection, he added. “I felt our relationship, we were able to get to a point where we were able to communicate nonverbally … which is a first for me actually.”
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Buckley added that the mood on set was a happy one despite the subject matter.
“I think we all approach it with intention, but with the lightest of touches, and we just loved each other, you know, we really were like a family, we absolutely were like peas in a pod from, from the get-go, and we laughed a lot. We laughed a lot amongst all the other stuff, so it felt alive,” she told PEOPLE.
In one of his next projects, Mescal will play Paul McCartney in director Sam Mendes’s four-film series about the Fab Four, The Beatles — A Four-Film Cinematic Event.
Hamnet is in select theaters now, and expands wider on Dec. 5.
