Paul Mescal has admitted that the press tour for 2024's Gladiator II was more difficult than he expected it to be.
After his career breakthrough with the 2020 TV show Normal People, the Irish actor got his start in movies with independent projects like The Lost Daughter, Aftersun and All of Us Strangers.
He then made the leap into the world of studio blockbusters with Ridley Scott's epic, the long-awaited sequel to 2000's Gladiator, and embarked on a three-week global press tour that involved stops in Sydney, Tokyo, London, New York and Los Angeles.
While he knew such a mammoth publicity circuit would be difficult, Mescal found it even harder than he expected.
"It is a first-world problem: I got to lead a massive studio film and one that I'm incredibly proud of, but I just fundamentally don't have the make-up to deal with a global press tour. I felt like I got boring questions from people for three weeks," he told GQ.
"I was expecting to find the press tour difficult, and then it was more difficult than I thought," he continued. "I couldn't avoid my face, and if I'm getting bored of it, I can't imagine what people were f**king... I'm like, I get you!"
Since Gladiator II, Mescal has returned to smaller, more emotionally-driven films, such as Hamnet and The History of Sound.
In an interview with The Guardian earlier this month, the 29-year-old admitted that he feels more comfortable working on films on that scale.
"I loved the process of making that film but The History of Sound felt like home to me. It's where I'm most comfortable. I want to make more films like that versus ones on the scale of Gladiator II," he shared.
Out of all of the projects he has made in the past six years, the success of 2022's Aftersun - for which he was nominated for a Best Actor Oscar - will never be topped for him.
"You don't make something like Aftersun and think: 'I know where we'll be going in 2023!' I doubt that will ever be topped for me, because it's not the sort of film that usually gets recognised in that capacity," he explained.
Mescal will be taking a break from the public eye at the end of the Hamnet awards campaign to focus on making four Beatles films, a return to major studio projects. He will make his comeback to promote them in 2028.
