The accidental Hollywood hero! As Gladiator star Paul Mescal packs out cinemas, his ex-teachers tell the Mail he was a 'jock' obsessed with football - until he was forced to audition for a school production of Phantom Of The Opera...

Everything about the big screen's new Gladiator radiates future Hollywood icon. 

For a start, Paul Mescal makes women everywhere go dizzy: that handsome face with its aquiline nose and hooded blue eyes, his honed physique and brand of sensitive masculinity.

Who could forget, for example, the collective swooning over the silver chain the 28-year-old wore in the coming of age drama Normal People?

Then there's the intense screen presence which enables him to go from conflicted Irish teenager to Andrew Scott's love interest in All Of Us Strangers.

No wonder Mescal fascinates women and has won a clutch of best actor awards.

When he starred in A Streetcar Named Desire in the West End last year, Angelina Jolie came over from New York and took him out for a coffee.

He's also been pictured sharing a cigarette and a joke after meeting Natalie Portman for dinner. Never mind that both divorced women are far older than Mescal.

He, meanwhile, had a long romance with the musician Phoebe Bridgers and is now dating singer Gracie Abrams. 

Given Mescal's immense charisma and talent, perhaps the most surprising thing about the 'Irish Brando', as he's been dubbed, is that he only got into showbusiness by accident.

At school in Maynooth, near Dublin, he was known as a sporty 'jock' – feted for his skill at Gaelic football.

But aged 16, he was compelled to audition for the school musical – it was compulsory for all pupils – and it was that performance, as teachers told the Mail this week, which completely changed the course of his life.

In an early interview, he said: 'I was a 16-year-old boy and wanted to be perceived as cool by my friends.

'I know for a fact I probably wouldn't have auditioned because of the masculinity that I'd been prescribed by being on a sports team. But since we all had to audition, I was, like, 'Well, I may as well put my best foot forward'.'

Teacher Anne Marie Lawlor recalls spotting the first signs of Mescal's talent: 'I taught him singing in his fourth year of secondary school.

'He, like everyone else, had to take the music class. At that stage, he was really into his GAA [Gaelic Athletic Association] and he was a bit of a lad, to be honest – everyone knew he was a great player.

'But when he started to sing, it was just this great baritone voice, he just stood out from everybody else.

 'It was a moment you know, when he stood in front of the whole class and sang. He'd only been in the class a few weeks when I persuaded him to do that and how the whole class responded to him.

'They thought he was fantastic and you can tell he felt that, he knew it, and I think that's when the performer in him was born. It was lovely to see someone who didn't know they could, realise that they had this talent.'

It was soon afterwards that he auditioned for the school play – a production of Phantom Of The Opera. His history teacher Sinead O'Carroll, who was also involved in the play, was blown away.

She said: 'He was a natural from day one. It was 2012, the production was The Phantom Of The Opera and he was the Phantom. He needed no instruction, no coaching, he just turned up and assumed the role. He became the Phantom.

'He was so, well, professional really. I'd never seen this from a pupil before.

'Even when it came to the love scenes, he didn't laugh or giggle the way most young lads would. He just took it in his stride like it was the most natural thing in the world.

'Up until that point he'd been known throughout the school for his sporting prowess. But after Phantom, he started thinking about acting seriously, that he could make a career of it.' 

As Mescal has since recalled of stepping onto the stage: 'I've never felt an adrenaline rush like it.'

He considered joining the Army as a teen but, discussing it with a careers guidance counsellor, was asked if he wouldn't rather go to drama school and pursue his burgeoning passion for acting instead.

'I think had I lived in London or LA or New York, there would have been a clearer kind of understanding that you can go down this road for your job.

'It took me a second to come to that conclusion living in Maynooth,' he said.

Mescal, one of three children born to retired Garda [police] officer Dearbhla and retired teacher Paul, went on to study drama at the Lir Academy.

His father was always involved in amateur dramatics and singing, and his sister Nell is a successful singer. 

His acting teacher Hilary Wood said he was 'ostentatiously talented' from the beginning. Even before he graduated from the Lir, he was cast as the lead in The Great Gatsby at the Gate Theatre in Dublin.

His former history teacher Sinead O'Carroll came to see him.

She said: 'He was only 21 at the time but he shone. I saw him afterwards and said, 'You're going to be famous'.'

How right she was. Two years later, he was cast as Connell in Normal People and when the show was broadcast in 2020, during the pandemic, everything changed.

Normal People, based on Sally Rooney's novel about teenage lovers, won him a TV Bafta for best actor and became the BBC's most-streamed series of 2020.

And all the frankly but tenderly depicted sex in the drama – in which he starred alongside

Daisy Edgar-Jones – turned him into the nation's boyfriend. When, in an interview, Mescal explained how much he deplored the toxicity of men like Andrew Tate and how he valued the importance of consent, a sex symbol for a new era was born.

But the timing meant fame came just at the point where he was living alone in London in lockdown and Mescal has said he struggled with the attention.

'Normal People was very sexualised, there was lots of sex in it,' he said. 'But I think when it becomes personal, it's just uncomfortable.

'What I've learned, though, is that I can deal with that. 

'I don't need to throw my toys out of the pram. It's something I can just choose to not give a s*** about.'

 He quit social media and tried to keep as low a profile as possible.

He was Oscar nominated for his heartbreaking performance as a troubled young dad in the 2022 film Aftersun, and was set for a career in independent movies before being asked to meet with Ridley Scott on Zoom to discuss Gladiator II.

The two of them talked about the film for 15 minutes and about Gaelic football for ten. 

Scott saw in Mescal the charisma of his original Gladiator, Russell Crowe, and a hint of Irish hellraiser Richard Harris, who played Emperor Marcus Aurelius in the original film.

'He was a special find ... absolutely perfect,' the director told Vanity Fair.

Mescal said that he 'blacked out' and yelled in joy when his agents told him that the role was his. Plans to make a British spy movie A Spy By Nature were dropped.

He told GQ magazine: 'My agent refers to me openly as a psychopath when it comes to work. I feel an intense desire to have this for ever. I want this to never stop. So with that comes a kind of neurosis of control.'

Before filming started, that neurosis of control was sated by training in fighting and horseriding, plus bodybuilding every day. 

Mescal refused to quit smoking or drinking alcohol – he loves the sociability of pubs and bars – but added 18lb of muscle for the role via diet and exercise.

He said: 'You start feeling like your body can inflict damage, which is weird. It changes the way you move and operate. 

'And that's a fun kind of place to live when it's make-believe.'

The shoot, in Malta at the height of summer, was physically demanding and psychologically daunting.

'First day walking into the Colosseum, he nearly died,' said Ridley Scott. 'He didn't realise it was going to be so big.'

Mescal remembers Scott coming up to him and slapping him on the back, saying: 'Just remember: your nerves are no good to me.'

Carrying a $250 million epic is, of course, a unique challenge.

Mescal told an interviewer: 'I built it up in my head. I was like, "OK, today's the day that Denzel (Washington) is going to be on set." And I was so incapacitated by it that I suddenly was like, "This is so f****** stupid. I have a job to do".'

In January, Mescal was downbeat on the fame that the film will bring, which will inevitably be more intense than anything he has experienced so far.

He said in an interview that he would 'just get too bored' if he couldn't lead a normal life, adding that he didn't want to stop 'going out or meeting someone in a bar or getting drunk at a party'.

There is no sign of that happening. Mescal tends to surround himself with his family – brother Donnacha, sister Nell and his parents – on his 'big nights'.

His siblings came with him to the Vanity Fair Oscars party two years ago. Nell was his date at the Baftas, too. Both siblings and his parents were there at the UK premiere on Wednesday night.

Old friend Aoibheann McCann acted with Mescal in The Great Gatsby months before he hit the big time with Normal People and concurs that he's still the man she got to know.

She says: 'I saw him recently and he's still the same Paul. His success hasn't changed him. 

'I'd put that down as well to his family. I wouldn't say they're normal because that wouldn't do them justice.

'They're just very grounded people who check in with each other all the time to see how everyone is doing.

'I remember being on tour with Paul with Rough Magic (a theatre company) and his mam would come to collect us to bring us back, a fantastic woman.

'You couldn't meet a nicer family and we couldn't work with a better actor than Paul.

'He reads things so well, he really set the script. That's why he's able to do difficult plays like A Streetcar Named Desire. 

'It's not every actor who can take on roles like that.' She adds: 'He's the most gentle, humble guy who is so kind and intelligent to work with. It's impossible to say anything negative about Paul.

'We are all watching his success, but we know he won't be dragged into an A-lister type lifestyle and all the things that go with that. He's resolutely down to earth, he still hangs out with his old friends. He's still really loyal to all his Irish creative circle.

'About his sexual appeal, I can't really say as I'm his friend, but what I would say is that he doesn't use the sex appeal to get on with his career. 

'He doesn't play on it. He's far more honest that.'

Still, it won't stop legions of women lusting after this new Gladiator.