Paul Mescal’s next film is a gay romance about two travelling folk singers with Josh O’Connor
Paul Mescal‘s next film will be a historical drama centred on a gay romance in which he will star opposite Challengers‘ Josh O’Connor.
Variety reported last Friday (February 14) that The History Of Sound – which was first announced in 2021 – has been picked up for theatrical release sometime this year.
This makes it Mescal’s next theatrical event after 2024’s Gladiator 2 – the actor is also due to star as William Shakespeare in Hamnet, directed by Chloe Zhao (Nomadland, Eternals), but that has yet to receive a release date.
Per Variety, The History Of Sound is about two young men – Lionel (Mescal) and David (O’Connor) – who set out to record the lives, voices and music of Americans in the shadow of WWI. But as they begin the project, the two fall in love.
In the past few months, Mescal has also been rumoured to portray Paul McCartney in the planned Beatles biopics by Sam Mendes. Previous reports have stated that Harris Dickinson would play John Lennon, Barry Keoghan would play Ringo Starr and Joseph Quinn would play George Harrison.
His Gladiator 2 director Ridley Scott also once suggested that he wasn’t able to cast Mescal in his next project The Dog Stars as he’s “stacked up, doing the Beatles next”. However, Mescal has said that he’s “massively down” to star in Gladiator 3 in the future, should it be greenlit.
Mescal’s leading role in The History Of Sound isn’t his first time playing a homosexual character, having starred in 2023’s acclaimed All Of Us Strangers. Prior to that film’s release, Mescal weighed in on the topic of straight actors playing gay roles.
“It depends who’s in charge of telling the story,” he said. “The issue is that there have been so many queer performances in cinema that have been offensive, but that’s because the filmmakers and the actors have been careless.” The History Of Sound is directed by Oliver Hermanus, an openly queer filmmaker.
O’Connor last appeared in Challengers, which scored a four-star review by NME: “The performances are exceptional, with off-the-scale chemistry between all three leads. Zendaya, in particular, is a force of nature, and you feel her angry frustration at her own career path (which was cut short by injury) in every scene. O’Connor and Faist are equally good, and if the film has a flaw, it’s only that it doesn’t explicitly dig deeper into their feelings for each other, leaving it as an underlying suggestion instead.”
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Daniel Peters
NME
