Paul Mescal revealed that his background as a GAA player may have landed him a role on the upcoming Gladiator sequel. Paul is set to play Lucius, the son of Lucilla from the first film, with the sequel following Lucius in his young adulthood. Before hitting it big as an actor with his breakout role in Normal People, Paul played GAA at minor level — winning an All-Ireland minor football championship with Kildare — and with him performing several stunts in the film, Paul reckons that his GAA background was what convinced director Ridley Scott to cast him.
‘We spoke for about 20 to 30 minutes [in our first meeting],’ Paul told Vanity Fair. ‘I wanted to get a flavour from him about what the story was going to be about, so we spent about 15 minutes talking about that, and then we spent another 10 minutes talking about the sport that I played growing up — Gaelic football. ‘Maybe [GAA] was something that helped with it, in that I’m used to being physical in my body.
My memory of it is that probably two or three weeks later, the offer came in.’ Paul won an All-Ireland minor championship with Kildare in 2013 before his acting career got serious — with him becoming a household name with Normal People in 2020. He spoke fondly about his time as a GAA player in an interview back in 2022 with Seth Myers in the US — describing the sport as ‘chaos’ and a mixture of soccer and rugby, before revealing that before starting his final year as a drama student, he broke hi.