Paul Mescal, Josh O’Connor find love and song in ‘The History of Sound,’ a WWI romance


“What happens if your first love is your greatest love and your last love?” That is the question in the heart of “The History of Sound”, the new historical romantic drama starring Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor, who premieres Friday in cinemas.

Directed by Oliver Hermanus and adapted by the writer Ben Shattuck from his own story of the same name, the film explores the impact of a fleeting romance between Lionel (Mescal) and David (O’Connor), two Boston conservative music students who meet in a piano bar in 1917, where Lionel Overhears David singing a song from his youth, and quickly, and quickly. Several years later, after serving in World War I, David asks Lionel to join him on an improvised trip through Maine’s forests to collect traditional popular songs to preserve them for future generations.

“What I find so interesting about the movie is that it is not that trope of, the man enters a bar, looks through the bar, sees someone who likes it, and falls in love. It is the opposite. You see the back of David’s Head, and you see Lionel’s head and the script explained that these are two people who met,” Mescal told NBC News in a joint interview with a joint interview with O ” -‘Konor. “It is not physical chemistry, initially; it is intellectual and artistic chemistry.”

O’Connor described the relationship of the characters as an “external” romance and said he was attracted to the way “his entire relationship is looking for other things to add it.”

“The adventure that continues is about inviting other people to their world,” he said. “It is a very selfless romance in that sense, so I think that was something I had not seen in a movie before, and that really felt a different way of telling a love story.”

Paul Mescal, Oliver Hermanus and Josh O’Connor at the premiere of “The History of Sound” New York at the Walter Reade Theater on September 2.Jamie McCarthy / Getty Images Archives

Even decades after they separate, Lionel is constantly attracted to his memories of his short time with David. For Hermanus, whose previous films “Beauty” (2011) and “Moffie” (2019) have examined the brutal “political side of rarity” in his native South Africa, “The history of sound” represented an opportunity to tell a Gay love story that would want to see.

“Life must be full of yearning and I remember,” he said. “There should be a dramatic element in life where things do not always work in the way you expect, but there is this appreciation of the things you have, the things you experience. I think it is a very realistic or very poetic form of seeing the life of one.”

The filmmaker was particularly insistent in elaborating a central romance that goes against the representations of same -sex relationships during that time, which were often characterized by danger and secret. Lionel and David never explicitly label their relationship, and their romance exists in a bubble.

“The biggest political act of making a film like this is not giving politics any oxygen,” said Hermanus. “The great liberation here is that the film is the same, and the characters have no explanation.”

Mescal and O’Connor met early during the Covid-19 pandemic, when their mutual agent offered to establish them in a zoom call. Mescal has just left the success of “normal People”, while O’Connor was in the middle of a career of two stations such as Prince Carlos in “The Crown”. The actors immediately joined a similar taste in actors, films and directors, and subsequently signed “the history of sound” separately. The film faced numerous delays, first with financing, and then with the Hollywood pandemic and dual strikes. But even when their profiles increased, both actors remained committed to making the film.

“We were strangely fortunate that the film took as long as it did, because it did not mean that we had to do an intensive course in friendship in the weeks before shooting. It was something that naturally evolved for five years,” Mescal said. “We entered the perfect point where we really knew each other and liked each other, and then I think we fell in love with each other, he did.”

Because the film took so long to finance and do, said Hermanus, “he was able to observe the type of closeness” his main men had.

“What they really have like Paul and Josh is a kind of very fraternal love, which is jokes and nonsense, and that was a kind of energy we had on the set,” he said.

That joy was a way for the actors compensating the quiet pain and the anguish of history. In the final act of the film, Lionel discovers that the “very passionate person lover of music” fell in love “has been attenuated by the trauma of war,” said Hermanus. “That song collection trip becomes the flowering of their relationship, but also becomes the omen, because by the time they are on that trip, they have changed.”

“The way David sees the world is so pure and so cheerful, and it is like the purest optimistic. Ultimately, all this adventure is and for his love for music; it is also for his love for Lionel. It is he making space for them to experience something they love together in the most pure and exciting way,” O’Connor added. “The sadness that goes next to that is that we discover that behind that type of optimism with very open eyes is a kind of intrinsic sadness, and that is the pain of the film. Seeing that through Lionel’s eyes retrospectively, that is what is so powerful.”

Neither Mescal nor O’Connor is a stranger to tell Gay Agrude love stories: O’Connor broke out in the “country of God” of 2017, while Mescal consolidated his status from one of the leading men on the rise of Hollywood in the “Strangers Us Strangers” of 2023. Both actors, who have admitted to having had feelings found on the subject Heterosexual actors should play queer characters, they say that conversation is always evolution.

“It is a conversation that has definitely evolved since I have been in the theater school so far, and I am very grateful for it, because I never want to be only able to play things that feel close to me, and it is not that sexuality is the defining factor. In fact, I feel closer to many of the characters that are gay than those who are direct.” I do not think it is exclusive to the homosexual men that I am playing. I think it’s probably something that attracts me tonely in the sexuality of the characters I play. “

Hermanus said his approach to launching roles has always been linked to the connection he builds with an actor and his talent, instead of his personal identity.

“As a filmmaker, I would hate him if someone only offered me a job based on queer because I am a queer person,” he said. “I want the freedom to tell stories in any way I can represent.

O’Connor said that when he approaches any role, the starting point is like: “‘What can I extract from my own life in these characters?’ And sometimes, there are aspects of a character that are exaggerated, sometimes there is no. ” He added that there is so much in the character of David who resonated with him.

“I really remember reading that story short the first time. It hit me very strong. The duality of fear, love, pain and type of optimism with a kind of sadness of sadness, which would simply tear my heart,” he said. “So I think we are very lucky to play various roles in our career.”



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