The ‘internet’s boyfriends’ Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal on love, loneliness and online adoration

Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal are running hot. Scott is forever the “hot priest” from Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s hit comedy Fleabag, while Mescal has been at the top of the hot list ever since he broke out in the lockdown hit Normal People, then followed that up with his Oscar-nominated role in Aftersun.

Andrew Scott in a scene from All of Us Strangers.Credit: Searchlight Pictures via AP

Now, in what is possibly the canniest bit of casting over the last 12 months, the Irish actors play lovers in the heartbreaking drama All of Us Strangers. It’s a pairing the film’s publicity department is leaning into deeply, shouting out the “internet’s boyfriends” on Instagram, with another post featuring the pair reading out “thirst comments”. Example: “I want Andrew Scott to suffocate me with his arms.” What? Are they trying to kill us?

“The internet is a wild place,” says Scott, laughing. “It’s strange, all that stuff. You become much more aware of that when you’re promoting the film … I absolutely love Paul. He’s got such soul and that’s why the internet adores him. All that is really for fun. It’s much better to be in that situation than everybody being appalled or indifferent.”

“The internet’s boyfriends, reunited.” Instagram photo of Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal, the stars of All of Us Strangers.Credit: Instagram

In All of Us Strangers, Scott plays Adam, a lonely writer living in a desolate London apartment block. His quiet life is disrupted one night when a drunk neighbour, Harry (Mescal), knocks on his door. Harry’s persistence – his determination to crack open Adam’s shell – forms the backbone of the pair’s blossoming relationship, just as Adam starts to revisit the ghosts of his parents (Jamie Bell and Claire Foy), who died in a car accident when he was 12.

“He’s stuck in a sort of purgatory place,” says Scott of his character. “And he’s had a certain amount of arrested development because his parents were taken away from him. And it’s such a formative age. So he conjures up his family in order to kind of unstick himself, so he can be seen and be loved by his parents. And then in turn, he’s able to love somebody.”

Inspired by Japanese author Taichi Yamada’s novel Strangers, and written and directed by Andrew Haigh, it’s a story of loneliness and love, of confronting the past and finding the courage to open up. It’s tender and heartbreaking and left me in bits, sobbing from beginning to end. I can’t imagine what it must have been like reading the script for the first time knowing what lay ahead.

Andrew Scott (left), and Paul Mescal, as Harry find solace in one another in All of Us Strangers.

“I can remember crying, just reading the script,” says Scott. “And just feeling that it was a part that I felt that I could do something with. I saw a lot of myself in it, but then enough to use my imagination and create something new with Andrew [Haigh]. There’s not a lot of scripts like that, that have that originality, tone-wise, but also where the dialogue is so expertly done.”

For Mescal, reading the script for the first time left him “quite weepy as well”, but it was also cathartic.

“It’s the one time as an actor, you get the closest to an audience’s intended first response,” says Mescal. “And the thing that I found, that I hope some audiences are taking from it, that although it’s incredibly upsetting, the key message I took from it was one of hope. That even Adam, in particular, and definitely Harry as well, they are people who are struggling in the world, but also in some capacity, find a way to each other, and through that they find some sort of healing.”

Andrew Scott (left) with director Andrew Haigh in New York.Credit: AP

I talk to Mescal and Scott over Zoom a week apart. Mescal is getting his publicity out of the way before he resumes work on Ridley Scott’s strike-delayed sequel to Gladiator (despite much prodding, he won’t reveal a thing), while Scott is on duty for awards season, where the film has picked up multiple best film nominations – winning at the British Independent Film Awards – as well as best actor nominations for Scott, and writing and directing nominations for Haigh.

Mescal, 27, wearing a black hoodie, is the more relaxed of the pair, while Scott, 47, in a teal tracksuit, takes a minute to loosen up, but is delightful once he decides I’m not digging for anything too personal. The thing is, though, it’s an incredibly personal film for Scott, especially when it came to finding the emotions needed for his character, who reveals his sexuality to his parents, whose attitudes don’t match with the present.

Jamie Bell and Claire Foy play the Adam’s parents in All of Us Strangers. Adam (Andrew Scott) is able to go back in time and visit their ghosts.

“As a gay person, the feelings of shame that brings, particularly growing up in the ’90s, and in Catholic Ireland, there was so much misunderstanding, and so much misrepresentation and fearmongering in the press,” says Scott. “And there was just suspicion around queer people. And that was sort of unquestioned, really. So there’s a certain amount of shame that exists within so many people of that generation – and people within this generation, too – that I think has to be wrestled with daily. So that idea of you’re not going to be seen by your parents – it’s very difficult to feel a sense of confidence for Adam. So for me, [that emotion] wasn’t really that far from the surface ever.”

Adam’s relationship with his parents makes for some of the film’s most compelling scenes. His mother very casually asks if he’s married, not being able to get her head around the fact her son is gay, while his father apologises for not responding to Adam when he heard him crying in his bedroom.

“Of course, that’s wonderful [the apology],” says Scott. “But also, [his father] didn’t go into his bedroom. It’s that thing where you’re conjuring up that stuff, that you go, how could you hear a child next door crying and go, ‘I’m actually going to ignore that.’”

Harry, although younger and seemingly more at ease with his sexuality, also has a difficult relationship with his parents.

“It’s a totally different trauma, but an immense trauma that’s similar to Adam’s,” says Mescal. “The only difference is that Harry is grieving for his parents who are still alive, which is kind of an acute pain because they’re just not there at all. They’re as ghostly as Adam’s parents are. That’s the root of all his pain, and he has to … do his best and move on with his life.”

Andrew Scott as the Hot Priest in Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s comedy Fleabag.

Scott and Mescal first met around 2020 in a mash-up designed to break the internet, where Scott’s Hot Priest is counselling Normal People’s Connell (Mescal) over his feelings for Marianne in a Comic Relief fundraising sketch for Irish TV. They have been friends since, but All of Us Strangers brought them closer together.

“The surprising thing for both of us was how well we actually just got on,” says Mescal of their friendship. “And that obviously serves the film, but you know that intoxicating feeling of when you feel like you’ve made a lifelong friend, and you get to spend the day with them all the time? It mirrors the feeling of falling in love for the first time.”

Marianne (Daisy Edgar-Jones) and Connell (Paul Mescal) in Normal People.Credit: Stan

Just like everyone else, he fell for the Hot Priest!

“Yes, me and many others,” he says, laughing.

Ever since Normal People, Mescal’s career has taken off like a rocket. It’s not just the internet swooning over the silver chain he wore in Normal People, it’s his careful consideration of roles and the levels of emotion he brings to the screen. It all culminated in a head-spinning 2023, when he was nominated for an Oscar for Aftersun and won an Olivier Award for his lead role in A Streetcar Named Desire on the West End. He ended the year winning best supporting performance for All of Us Strangers at the British Independent Film Awards.

Frankie Corio (left) with Paul Mescal in Aftersun, for which he was nominated for an Oscar.

“The Oscar nomination and the Olivier, those are obviously big life moments, but they all came so thick and fast and I was working,” he says. “Maybe it’s been a detriment, maybe I need to process all this. But it hasn’t really registered to the extent that I think people imagine. Like, I’m aware that the picture of it from the outside looks quite overwhelming, but I think when you’re on the inside, you have a degree of control that helps.”

What he can’t control, though, is how people see him. Over the last couple of years Mescal has spent time in Sydney and Melbourne, where he filmed Carmen and Foe respectively. His presence in Sydney set off a flurry of excitement, with my local community Facebook group awash with possible sightings. Is he aware of the fuss he causes?

Paul Mescal with Andrew Scott in All of Us Strangers. The pair’s friendship “mirrors the feeling of falling in love for the first time”, says Mescal.

“It definitely felt more pronounced when I was in Melbourne because I was a year further into the whole [celebrity] thing,” he says. “I remember seeing something where the lady who served me at the coffee shop I used to go to in Melbourne – she was very sweet, very chatty, she never let on anything – and then after I left she was like, ‘Now that I know Paul is gone, I’m gonna share his coffee order with you’. So it felt like a gross betrayal of trust. I got loads of judgment because I put 1½ sugars in my coffee.”

That does seem a lot.

“Does it? I just feel like Australians are particularly healthy.”

We’ll wrap this up with Scott, mainly because by the end of our interview, he had relaxed so much, he was delighted to hear that his voice fills my house regularly on the cartoon School of Roars (he voices the narrator Mr Marrow). Scott also deserves the last word, because he believes All of Us Strangers ends on a note of hope. (Don’t get me wrong, you’ll be wrung out by the time you get there and still sobbing days later, so consider this your happy ending.)

“It’s getting a reputation for being a very sad film,” says Scott. “But I also think it’s a film about life and love. We see this character who’s not living – he’s sitting on his couch eating biscuits on his own – and then he goes through this extraordinary thing that may be difficult. But there is so much release in the film, there’s so much for Adam – there’s so, so many tears, but he’s physically present again. And even though he’s gone through an enormous amount of sadness, I think he will be OK.

“What the end of the film says for me is that none of us get to be here forever. So it’s about learning how to live and to be brave and to jump into love wherever we can find it while we’re here. I think that’s a really wonderful thing.”

All of Us Strangers is released in cinemas on January 18.

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