Oscar-nominee Paul Mescal knows he could be back to selling sausages in an instant
Financial stability in the arts? In this economy? Paul Mescal doesn't expect too much
Before he was the Oscar-nominated Paul Mescal of Aftersun, the Irish actor was a working sausage pitchman like the rest of us. And he hasn’t forgotten his roots. Mescal landed his breakout role on the BBC romance series Normal People in 2019, but only a few short months prior, he was hocking hog in a commercial for the Irish sausage sellers Denny & Sons.
“I trained in drama school for three years, and took it so seriously. It was like, I loved the craft of it, and then I was poor,” Mescal told BBC Radio 4 (via IndieWire). “My agent was like, ‘I don’t know how you’ll deal with this, but we’ve got a sausage advert that you can go on.’ I was like, absolutely. I need to pay my rent.”
It was time for Mr. Mescal to see how the sausage was made because doing Becket at art school doesn’t pay the bills. But that knowledge came at a price; playing the plucky, aspiring globetrotter in the ad, Mescal took it upon himself to go method and “eat 15 sausages” in a morning instead of using the bucket “you’re supposed to spit them out into.” Although, in Mescal’s defense, spitting out perfectly good sausage “felt rude” to the actor.
Mescal isn’t ignorant of the pitfalls of success, though. He knows winning awards won’t keep him from commercial work. Look at Shaq. All the money, accolades, and talent in the world, yet he’s still beholden to the whims of The General. “If I ever feel like I get too big for my boots,” he said, “it kind of pops up somewhere that we shouldn’t forget that I was promoting sausages when I got out of drama school.”
Let that be a lesson to us all. Just because you’re cast by Richard Linklater, that doesn’t mean you won’t be selling links later.