Normal People's Paul Mescal opens up about being totally naked on screen
We are unequivocally obsessed with Normal People. From the soundtrack, to the locations, to the characters. Marianne and Connell, aka Daisy Edgar-Jones and Paul Mescal, have stolen our hearts and broken them into a million pieces, and we are totally OK with it.
The latter, who had never starred in a TV production before, has been opening up about what it was like to work on Normal People; specifically, the sex scenes.
The Irish actor, 24, spoke to MR PORTER about how being 'fully nude' on television makes him 'slightly nervous', but that he and Daisy knew they were in the same boat, and the help of intimacy director Ita O'Brien (who also worked on Netflix's Sex Education) helped.
"On the first Friday of the first week, we had a full day of sex scenes," he revealed. "It's fair to say we were both incredibly nervous. That Thursday, I didn't sleep."
BBC
Speaking of viewers seeing him "fully nude on screen", Paul continued, "I'm not concerned about it because I made a choice that this project is something that I'm proud of. Well, on paper, that makes sense. [But] the closer I'm getting to people seeing me fully nude on screen – it does make me slightly nervous."
Talking about working with intimacy director Ita, he continued: "We would discuss the scene and then Ita would block what we had discussed, so it wasn't mine or Daisy's responsibility to decide what was appropriate… you're told what to do. It's freeing!"
BBC
On the pair's on-screen chemistry, he added: "Even if we had rehearsed for five or six months, it's not something that we could have cultivated. It's an innate thing, you can't read a book and suddenly have chemistry between two people."
You've got that right.
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Dusty Baxter-Wright is an award-winning journalist and the Entertainment and Lifestyle Director at Cosmopolitan, having previously worked at Sugarscape. She was named one of PPA’s 30 Under 30 for her work covering pop culture, careers, interiors and travel, and oversees the site’s Entertainment and Lifestyle strategy across print, digital and video. As a journalist for the best part of a decade, she has interviewed everyone from Louis Theroux and Channing Tatum to Margot Robbie and Ncuti Gatwa, while she has also spoken on Times Radio and BBC Radio. You can find her on Twitter and Instagram here.
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