Mescal tells JOE why he felt it very necessary to do this new movie, which arrives in Irish cinemas this week.
In what will be his first cinematic release following his Oscar-nominated turn in Aftersun, we’ll soon be seeing Paul Mescal in powerful Irish drama God’s Creatures.
The movie tells the story of a young man (Paul Mescal) who returns home to Ireland after working in Australia for a number of years, to an overjoyed reaction by his overworked mother (Emily Watson). However, he is barely back home a few days when he is accused of assault by a local woman, and without thinking twice, his mother provides him an airtight alibi. But her trust in her son’s innocence slowly begins to erode when she spends more time with him…
In the run-up to the release of the movie, while it premiered at the Dublin International Film Festival earlier in March, we sat down with Paul and Emily to chat about the movie, and you can watch that interview in full right here:
During the chat, we asked Paul Mescal about potentially being fearful of taking on a project like this, which tackles such a hot topic in a direct but also specifically Irish way. He told us the following:
“Just the standard of the script, full stop, just artistically as a script was beautiful, so that initially was why I was like ‘I am absolutely gonna do this’, but politically, it was something that I was really interested to be involved with. And I was hoping it would continue the conversation that has been happening around the idea of consent, why we protect young men in this society, because they are perceived to be these ‘golden boys’, it is all just noise.
“And I think that this film cuts to the centre of what, I think, pillars in our community are doing to protect those young men, and the damage that that does. And that is something that I’m very interested in talking about.”
Additionally, Emily Watson said that doing projects with stories like this are vital, saying:
“Why are you in it, if you don’t want to tell stories that are difficult and are going to change the conversation. Really reflect the reality of what is going on, and that is something that is really exciting about what is happening in Irish culture, that this storytelling is really reflecting that generation here of people who are going ‘Wait, hang on, I’m not taking that, I’m not accepting that, lets change things’. I think that’s amazing.”
God’s Creatures arrives in Irish cinemas on Friday, 24 March.
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