Turns out Saoirse Ronan always knew Paul Mescal would be a star.
The actress told Harper’s Bazaar that she knew “Aftersun” Academy Award nominee Mescal was clearly an A-lister after first seeing him in a now viral 2018 sausage commercial in Ireland.
“The first time I saw Paul act was in a commercial for Denny’s sausages in Ireland,” Ronan said. “He’ll kill me for mentioning it, but — I’m not actually joking — that was the first time I went, ‘Oh, who’s that guy? He’s really good.’”
Ronan and Mescal are co-starring in Garth Davis’ dystopian drama “Foe” based on Iain Reid’s novel of the same name. The duo portray a married couple living 40 years in the future where an environmental crisis has made their farmland almost uninhabitable. Mescal’s character is ordered to leave his home to help pilot a space program while his wife, played by Ronan, would be looked after.
Mescal addressed his sausage commercial that aired two years prior to his breakout role in Hulu series “Normal People.”
“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 said during BBC Radio 4’s “Today” (via Insider). “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.”
He added, “If I ever feel like I get too big for my boots, it kind of pops up somewhere that we shouldn’t forget that I was promoting sausages when I got out of drama school.”
And let’s just say that Mescal did his own stunts for the ad: “They do this thing where they come around with like a bucket that you’re supposed to spit them out into, and that just felt rude to me,” Mescal said of eating the product while filming. “But I learned my lesson that it’s better to do that than have to eat 15 sausages in a morning. That was an experience.”
