Paul Mescal says Colin Farrell left him on read for a year

During Paul Mescal’s recent visit to Hot Ones, host Sean Evans asked a question almost as spicy as his wings: “Be honest, are all Irish actors friends and if so, what’s the best part of hanging out with Colin Farrell?” Luckily for Evans, Mescal reacted with an affirmative guffaw instead of throwing his glass of milk right in the host’s face. But the fact that Mescal and Farrell (and potentially all other Irish actors) do seem to be friends doesn’t mean they’re great at actually communicating with each other—or won’t put each other on blast for a bit of a laugh. 

“Colin Farrell actually sent me a text a couple of days ago where I’d sent him a text a year ago because he wrote a lovely piece for me in Time magazine,” Mescal said, explaining that the message he’d sent was something along the lines of “thank you for the sweet text.” “And then I got a text a couple of days ago being like, ‘Sorry I didn’t get to this, I know I’m a year late,'” the Gladiator II actor continued. Oops! Luckily, it doesn’t sound like there’s any bad blood between the two Irishmen. “Colin and I got to hang out a bit with the Oscars run a couple years ago, and he’s just an absolute gentleman,” Mescal gushed. All is good on the Emerald Isle. 

Mescal also shared that one of his “favorite things about being an actor” is that he’s able to obscure embarrassing personal quirks—like, say, being really bad at responding to texts—behind the characters he plays. “When you see a musician release a record you assume that that’s their active inner life… whereas when you’re acting… an audience, unless you choose to tell them, never really knows what bits are totally lifted from your life that you have an active relationship to versus the parts that are totally devised,” he said. “It’s a part of the job that I think my favorite actors keep somewhat private.”

If Farrell ever plays a sluggish communicator in a movie, we’ll know that—just this once—it’s not parasocial to assume it’s coming from somewhere real. To even things out, Mescal also shared an anecdote about a hardship on the Gladiator II set that affected the real-life actor underneath all that armor and big character writing. “The biggest [challenge] was the heat,” he said. “Especially around the fight that I have with the gladiator that comes off the rhino, where you’re nearly getting sick after certain takes and ice being poured down your back, and Ridley’s like, ‘You ready to go again?’ The leather cuirasses act like little radiators. The heat is pretty extraordinary.” 

You can watch Mescal sweat it out either on Hot Ones (below) or in Gladiator II, which premieres November 22 in theaters.