Paul Mescal Enters the Arena in Gladiator II

Here’s where I notice another difference from the last time we talked four years ago. Back then, he was experiencing that first bloom of fame, and all that came with it, and seemed noticeably tense about it. Now, he might not love it—definitely does not love it—but he’s learned to be more outwardly sanguine. “Better that somebody has a strong opinion about you rather than no opinion at all, even if it’s wrong,” Mescal says. “You know who you are behind closed doors, and that’s the private bit that needs to be protected.”

He keeps his circle of friends close, many of them from growing up or former costars like Daisy Edgar-Jones and Saoirse Ronan. (While we’re talking, Josh O’Connor and Andrew Scott, who have separately played his gay lovers in films, send him a selfie of the two of them together.)

Even if he doesn’t have public social media accounts, it doesn’t mean he’s not scrolling. Back last winter, there were rumors, inflamed via TikTok videos, that Mescal would have one-night stands, take them for walks in the park the next day, point out a bird or a tree, and then take off running in another direction.

“Ohhhhhhh,” he moans, head in his hands, when I bring it up. He stays there for a while, belly laughing and turning red. “Fucking hell!”

Those videos first came out around the holidays when he was with his siblings. “We were looking at the videos and we were pissing ourselves at it. Categorically untrue. And we were laughing, laughing, laughing, laughing,” he says. “And the one thing that upset me was that I was in the kitchen, I remember my mum looking at the videos and she was getting upset. Isn’t that devastating? I was like, Oh, it’s funny to us—my brother, me, my sister—because we know that this is the way the internet works. It’s hilarious. If it was true, it’d be fucking bad, but as a rumor, it’s funny. Then I was like, Oh, if you’re a mother, her impulse is to come out and be like, ‘He wouldn’t do this.’ ”

We laugh some more and we move on, but then we round our way back to the subject because he’s nervous. That it came up at all, that he responded in any way that could have fanned the flames.