Ask Paul Mescal about playing Paul McCartney in the first Beatles movie for Sam Mendes, currently filming at Bovington Airfield Studios outside London, and his face lights up.
He’s in Los Angeles for a stretch to do promotion for Chloé Zhao’s “Hamnet” around the Palm Springs Awards Gala, Critics Choice Awards (where the “Hamnet” team celebrated the inevitable win for Jessie Buckley as Agnes Shakespeare), and the Golden Globes this Sunday. Mescal is dutifully making the rounds of interviews, Q&As, and parties — and is now an Actor Award nominee from the Screen Actors Guild.
But he cannot wait to get back to work strumming the bass left-handed and singing harmonies with fellow Beatles Harris Dickinson as John Lennon and Joseph Quinn as George Harrison. (Barry Keoghan is drumming as Ringo Starr.) They have four movies to shoot — performing Beatles songs live — and that means a lovely two-year stretch where Mescal has no promotion duties at all. It makes his heart sing.
“It’s so good when you get to do Zoom press with [‘Gladiator II’ co-star] Pedro [Pascal] or ‘The History of Sound’ co-star] Josh [O’Connor] or Jessie,” he said. “It’s immediate. It’s such a joy. But I do find that it cranks up this level of imposter syndrome, where you spend so much time talking about it that when you go back to set, you’re like, ‘Jesus, I better be fucking good,’ because you spent so much time discussing it. I’m just taking a break from promoting because I have nothing to promote!”
Mescal has been practicing the guitar since October 2024, a process he described as initially “slow, arduous” because he had to switch to his left hand. “But I can play.” He was already versed on the piano. He has music in him, ever since he discovered his muse playing the lead role in “Phantom of the Opera” in secondary school.
The Beatles’ mystical bond will come across in the movie, said Mescal. “There was a period of time in the summer when we were preparing, which was incredibly useful, where it was just me and Harris, which is great for the spirit of the piece,” he said. “We’re very, very tight, and I could bet my house that that will translate when we see the films. That’s what they had: a complicated, thorny thing rooted in the fact that there’s four people in the world who know what it was like to be in that place. It must have been the most bonding, because you can only hold on to the three guys [on] either side of you. That feels true of what it’s even like to film it. It’s an intense responsibility, and we’re leaning on each other to hopefully achieve something special — it’s thorny and full of ambition and jealousy and love, all of these amazing artistic frictions.”
Harris Dickinson, Paul Mescal, Barry Keoghan, and Joseph Quinn as The BeatlesCourtesy Apple
Another reason Mescal is feeling joy playing McCartney: Most of his filmography (his breakout TV series “Normal People,” Oscar-nominated “Aftersun,” “Gladiator II,” “God’s Creatures,” “All of Us Strangers,” “The History of Sound”) has leaned into “heavier territory,” he said.
And he won’t have to sell his film with Richard Linklater either: another music movie, Stephen Sondheim musical “Merrily We Roll Along,” which is filming in eight or nine installments with gaps in between as they move forward in time. Mescal has already shot four times over four years, but will wait seven more for the next one. “When I have to promote that, I’ll be trying to remind people that I exist when I’m 45,” he said.
Yes, singing Sondheim is hard. “He’s the gold standard,” said Mescal, who plays the gifted musical songwriter Frank, who morphs into a Hollywood star. “There’s definitely parallels you could draw with someone like Sondheim and Shakespeare. He’s the gold standard of musical theater, and Shakespeare is the same with the written word. And you could say McCartney is the same in terms of his composition and his lyricism. And there’s even music in how Shakespeare writes, as there is in Sondheim. There’s definitely a through line there.”
Jessie Buckley, Chloé Zhao, and Paul Mescal at the 37th Annual Palm Springs International Film Festival Film Awards held at Palm Springs Convention Center on January 03, 2026 in Palm Springs, California.Michael Buckner/Variety
While playing Shakespeare in “Hamnet,” Mescal did not view him as an intellectual. “I don’t think Will would even describe himself as an intellect,” he said. “We assume that because he’s the great writer. The reason that [Will and Agnes] connect is because they’re both heart-driven, and there’s a physical connection. A lot of work has to go into that first 40 minutes, because it’s brief. The more I see the film, the part of the film that I enjoy the most is the opening: the proposal around the pile of shit. It’s so fun. I’m proud of the chemistry that me and Jessie have. It’s a real thing, and it’s hard to do. She makes it easy.”
Producer Steven Spielberg suggested adding another scene with Hamnet between father and son: the swimming scene. “The first scene that we shot was ‘will you be brave?,’ he said. “That scene was there. I did an improvisation with Jacobi [Jupe] when he first came into audition — ‘will you be brave?’ — and he ran with it. So that made it into the script, which is a testament to Chloé, hearing what the actors want to say and making it work. Then the great Steven Spielberg said, ‘We need to have another scene where you feel like father and son are connected for that to then be shattered.’”
‘Hamnet’ ©Focus Features/Courtesy Everett Collection
One major difference between Maggie O’Farrell’s original novel and the movie (which she co-wrote with Zhao) is that Will is not 18 years old. Mescal turns 30 next month, and Buckley, 36, is six years older. “I don’t feel like you miss that,” said Mescal. “You fully get when Will is proposing to her and bringing the glove that he is a young man who desperately wants to be in love with this person, have sex with this person, be connected to this person, which feels like a young man’s impulse. And then you see when he’s older. But also, the scheduling and the scenes dictate a certain weight in the body that you can’t intellectualize. You’re just doing it.”
One late-night scene between Agnes and Will is hard to watch, dramatizing the profound distance between her earthbound herbalist mother and his drunk and frustrated writer. “I’ve never gone down the road of drinking on set,” he said. “What’s important about that scene to me is that I felt safe with Chloé and Jessie to try things I haven’t tried before. I feel real pain for Jessie, because up until that moment, you feel like a real chemistry and connection, but on that day, we weren’t able to find each other, and I know that feeling of being in love with someone deeply, but you are wildly frustrated by your work. She has no clue what’s going on, and he doesn’t really know what he’s trying to communicate. He’s from Stratford. He doesn’t come from a cultural hub where, ‘Oh, I know what it is to be a writer.’ It’s this weird form of inarticulacy that is so moving, and true. You don’t have to be William Shakespeare to understand that.”
Of course, the main focus on “Hamnet” is the ending, which moves audiences deeply. Zhao discusses the grieving mother’s inability to let Hamnet go. And what happens on the Globe stage at the premiere of “Hamlet” was that Agnes was able, because it was not Hamnet, to let him go. The moment they recreate from the book’s ending is the look between Will, on stage as the ghost king, and Agnes, pressing up against the stage, as their eyes meet.
‘Hamnet’©Focus Features/Courtesy Everett Collection
“I’m probably most proud of how robust that collaboration was between the three of us, between me and Chloé and Jessie, that we arrived at the end,” said Mescal. “Me and Chloé have a disagreement — that still we see differently — about where their marriage and relationship exist at the end. There is something shattered and repaired in a certain instance in that look, and for me, I don’t know how I can see Agnes and not feel like it’s a new beginning. Maybe it’s the romantic in me, and maybe it’s where I am in my head and my heart. That was always to me what that moment is. It’s so moving that that moment is connected to Agnes on the wedding day, saying, ‘Look at me, look at me.’ And Will turns around, and it mirrors that.”
Mescal recognizes that his role is in support of the titanic performance given by Buckley. “It’s robust, and this force of nature opposite you in Jessie, you have to meet that,” he said. “Whenever the dust settles on award season, it is a performance that — if I had seen [it] in drama school — people should be studying. She plays the context. I don’t think you can play what Agnes goes through in a way that is not Greek. [What] she goes through … it is huge. It’s massive.”
‘Hamnet’©Focus Features/Courtesy Everett Collection
William Shakespeare is a tough role to carry off because he’s not always likable. He abandons his family to pursue his art. “Will is a complicated person to play,” said Mescal, “because he’s not the focus, but he is also William Shakespeare. So you’re trying to sit on the choices that make him forgivable for a lot of the film? You’re committing to the concept that it is essentially from Agnes’ point of view. You were seeing William leave when his son has just died, and you want the audience to resent him for that, but then in that moment, it leaves a lot of pressure on landing the plane from my side, that people understand that he was expressing his grief away from home and in his art.”
Finally, for Mescal, that climactic look was “a feeling of heartbreak and relief,” he said. “Thank God you get to see this. Thank God you understand why I had to go away.”
Next Up: After Mescal finishes the Beatles films, he will return to his first love: theater. He earned raves as Stanley Kowalski in “Streetcar Named Desire” in London and Brooklyn, and will mount two more, “A Whistle in the Dark,” and “Death of a Salesman.” Yeah, the big one. “I’ll finish the Beatles,” he said. “I’ll go onto the stage for 2027. And then I’ll promote the Beatles in 2028.”