Paul Mescal & Josh O’Connor in a Romantic Film: A Years-Long Gamble
‘The History of Sound’ director Oliver Hermanus tells me how he snagged two of the hottest ascending stars: ‘It will always be a major memory’
Thought you were done hearing from me after that string of Toronto Film Festival dispatches? I’ll keep it quick today, sharing my conversation with Oliver Hermanus, whose new romantic period piece, The History of Sound, is in theaters this week, featuring two extremely of-the-moment stars. And as a reminder, I’ll be busy recapping TIFF, prepping for Sunday’s Emmys and then watching the show live with you over on Prestige Junkie After Party, so if you’ve got Emmys fever, that’s the place to be. Subscribe now for just $5 a month.
When I first read that Josh O’Connor and Paul Mescal were cast together in the period romance The History of Sound, I wasn’t sure how that could even work. Each has developed enviable resumes in the first half of this decade — Mescal in projects like Aftersun, All of Us Strangers, Gladiator II and the forthcoming Hamnet; O’Connor on The Crown and in features like Challengers and the upcoming Wake Up Dead Man. These guys are not just picking great projects and working with great directors, but they’re always the most dynamic part of their movies. Whenever O’Connor, 35, or Mescal, 29, is onscreen, you cannot look away from them. So how can one movie possibly handle them both?
Oliver Hermanus figured it out. As with his previous film, Living, which earned Bill Nighy a best actor nomination — up against Paul Mescal for Aftersun, as it turns out — The History of Sound unspools slowly, quietly, telling the melancholy story of musicians Lionel (Mescal) and David (O’Connor) as they fall in love at college in the early 1910s. The contemplative approach — plus a last-minute switch that had Mescal initially questioning everything; more on that below — allows room for each actor to excel.
“I don’t think of myself as a person who makes exclusively quiet things,” says Hermanus, a 42-year-old native of South Africa, who says he’s next hoping to make a movie set in the future. “I tend to make films where I’m interested in atmosphere; I’m interested in the feeling of things. That’s a big part of why it’s really important for the films that I make to be seen in a cinema. It’s meant to be an immersive resting experience and requires an active engagement, which is becoming harder these days for people.”
For Hermanus, O’Connor and Mescal, making The History of Sound required patience and active engagement, too. The original short story by Ben Shattuck first came to Hermanus before he’d even made Living. By the time he and Mescal were on the Oscar campaign circuit together in 2022, they were already looking for the right partners to make it. “You're in rooms meeting people and they would be like, ‘Oliver, do you know Paul?’ ‘Actually, we have a movie that you might be interested in that we’d love to make.’”
According to Hermanus, they’d hear back that people loved the screenplay, but not enough to make it into a movie. It was, “I really hope you guys find the money,” instead of “yes,” Hermanus says. That all changed when Aftersun and Living were both nominated, but there were still years of scheduling delays and an actors’ strike before the start of production. By the time Hermanus, Mescal, and O’Connor were all on set together in rural New Jersey, it felt like The History of Sound had already lived many lives.
“It was such a strange series of circumstances,” Hermanus says. “It had taken us so many years, and our lives had changed. We’d moved countries and Paul and Josh became incredibly famous, but they remained the same people. And our commitment to this form never wavered. And so there was so much love and passion and intention behind coming together and all going to a place we've never been before, which was New Jersey. It will always be a major memory and period of my life.”
‘You Can Easily Fall in Love With Him’
The History of Sound, which Mubi will release in theaters this weekend after its Cannes debut last May, kicks off a very busy fall for both of its stars. Both of them are fresh off raves at the Toronto International Film Festival, where Mescal’s Hamnet had audiences in floods of tears and O’Connor emerged as the undisputed MVP of the new Knives Out mystery, Wake Up Dead Man. O’Connor also has Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind and the indie Western Rebuilding, and Mescal will spend much of the next few months playing Paul McCartney in Sam Mendes’ ambitious films about The Beatles. To say they are in demand is a severe understatement.
All those years of getting The History of Sound made mean Hermanus knows possibly better than anyone how magnetic his stars are — and how to deploy them in precisely the right way. Initially, he tells me, Mescal was attached to play the role of David, the charismatic pianist who sweeps into the life of the more reserved Lionel and invites Lionel on a trip through rural New England to record folk songs. David is the flashier role in some ways, but Lionel is the heart of the film, which follows his character across many years (Oscar winner Chris Cooper provides voiceover as the older Lionel).
At some point in the process, though, Hermanus says he woke up in the middle of the night with the realization that the actors should switch parts. “I just decided that it was the wrong way around,” he says. “I remember Paul was shooting a movie, and he was like, ‘Oh God, I have to think about it. That’s so stressful. I’m so scared of that.’ So he took a week, and then he called me back, and he was like, ‘If Josh is good with it, I’m good with it.’”
What Hermanus had realized — and anyone who has seen Challengers can probably attest — was that while either actor would excel in either role, “Josh has this quality where he can be incredibly enigmatic and present and you can easily fall in love with him, but you can never really know him,” says Hermanus. As the film follows Lionel throughout his life, with David now absent, the audience misses him as much as Lionel does — and as much as Mescal missed O’Connor in real life. As Hermanus remembers, “We shot with Josh for a couple of weeks, and then Josh left, and Paul was devastated.”
Hermanus may want to make something futuristic and less restrained for his next film, but he, Mescal and O’Connor all seem to thrive in this world of tender indie films. The director is aware, though, that Hollywood is still calling his stars, and he can’t resist making a few jokes at their expense. Describing O’Connor as the “kind of actor who could probably play anything, including James Bond,” Hermanus seems aware that Bond rumors are trailing every English actor under 50 these days.
“It’s always fun to tease him about that,” Hermanus continues. “If that phone call came to Josh, I don’t know what he’d say.”