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Paul Mescal pretended he had quit GAA while learning to act, claiming that a crazed mugger broke his jaw when he broke it during a tackle.
But it was his experience in the sport that helped him achieve his big break in screen adaptation of ‘Normal People’.
The Irish actor, who plays Connell in the hit drama, was forced to make up the story when he was 21 years old.
Now 24, Mescal was a talented player in the GAA and had represented his Kildare county three times at the under-18 level.
When he was first accepted to the prestigious Lir Acting School at Trinity College Dublin in 2014, he was asked to stop playing.
However, having graduated from Maynooth’s senior team and Kildare’s under-21s, he secretly decided to keep playing.
Near
Paul Mescal with fellow on-screen star Daisy Edgar-Jones in the hit drama RTÉ. Photo: Enda Bowe / BBC / PA
“I got into the Lir and they have a totally correct and fair policy that prohibits contact sport.”
“I was playing for the Kildare under the age of 21 at the time and I was 18 years old, so I thought, ‘Right, I will jump into this training wholeheartedly,’ but I wasn’t ready to give up football.
“It was a very important part of my life and I was in love with the sport and my teammates.”
“I couldn’t reconcile that because I wasn’t sure I was good enough to be an actor, so I wasn’t ready to throw all that hard work into a maybe,” he told the ‘An Irishman Abroad’ podcast.
However, the weekend before his semester began, a quarterfinal championship would be almost cataclysmic for the student. Mescal reached out to pick up the ball only to receive an arm in the face that broke his jaw.
“I played to the end and only realized after it was broken properly,” he said. “If I had taken another belt, it would have broken and I would have had problems.”
Two days after the game, he was due to start rehearsals in his last year of play, with his jaw closed. “And I had to tell everyone at the university that I had been working at Maxol and that I had been mugged behind the box because I wouldn’t tell them that I was playing soccer. My dark and profound secret was that I was playing soccer.”
Fortunately, Mescal’s jaw healed extremely quickly and he was not delayed in his college work.
He graduated with an acting degree in 2017.
Mescal’s former manager as a minor footballer for Kildare praised his success and said he always knew the young man would be a star.
Brendan Hackett, who was manager of the Kildare minors in 2014 when Mescal was captain, said he was always a leader.
“Do you know when they ask you that question in a group that will ask it? It was always Paul.”
“I think the difference between arrogance and confidence is that confidence comes with a little bit of humility and Paul has that confidence.”
“It comes from a family and a work ethic where you work for what you get. It really deserves it,” he said.
The minors made it to the final that year, but eventually lost to Dublin, with Blues star Con O’Callaghan among Mescal’s opponents on the day.
“We lost that game, but I asked Paul to come back next year and speak to the team and then they won two titles,” said Hackett.
Irish Independent
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