An actor who seems locked in for Oscar glory at some point in the not-too-distant future, Maynooth-born Paul Mescal shot to fame in the BBC drama Normal People, for which he won a BAFTA television award among many other accolades.
Having cut his teeth in the Irish theatre, he solidified his rising star status with an acclaimed run as Stanley Kowalski in a West End revival of A Streetcar Named Desire, for which he won an Olivier award in 2022. He also played a small but pivotal role in Maggie Gyllenhaal's The Lost Daughter, which earned an Oscar nomination for his co-star Olivia Colman.
Mescal's own Oscar debut came in 2023, when he received a slightly unexpected but richly deserved nomination in the Best Actor category as a troubled young father in the moving Coming of Age drama Aftersun. With countryman Colin Farrell, Austin Butler and ultimate winner Brendan Fraser duking it out for the victory, Mescal was very much in the 'happy to be nominated' section of the category, but it was a clear stamp of a career on the rise.
He probably got close to a second nomination in 2024 for the criminally overlooked All Of Us Strangers. However, he did solidify his leading man credentials with the strong box office showing for Ridley Scott's Gladiator II, which may yet earn him a second nomination.
If not, further Oscar glory seems likely to arrive sooner rather than later either way. He's just wrapped up playing no less an icon than William Shakespeare in an adaptation of the novel Hamnet, directed by Chloé Zhao - and of course those with an eye on the long game could point to his involvement in Richard Linklater's ambitious 20-year musical project Merrily We Roll Along, which should be in cinemas no earlier than 2044.
