“The Crown” star and recent Emmy winner Josh O’Connor and “Normal People” BAFTA winner Paul Mescal will star in gay romance “The History of Sound,” an Oliver Hermanus-directed adaptation of an award-winning short story.
Produced by End Cue, the story follows two young men, Lionel (Mescal) and David (O’Connor), who, during the WW1 period, set out to record the lives, voices and music of their countrymen. An official description of the pic reads: “In this snatched, short-lived moment in their young lives, and while discovering the epic sweep of the U.S., both men are deeply changed.”
"The History of Sound” is based on the eponymous Pushcart Prize-winning story by American author Ben Shattuck, which is available to read online in literary journal The Common. Principal photography will begin in summer 2022, predominantly in the U.S. and on location in the U.K. and Italy. -@
This has begun filming. It was delayed while Hermanus was directing the Starz/Sky miniseries ‘Mary & George’ which is currently airing in the UK and airs in the US next month.
How to put it? This type of sadness. Not nostalgia. Not grief. Just the obvious and sudden fact that my life looked an inch shorter than it could have been. That the best year really had come when I was twenty.
Paul Mescal has worked with auteurs and iconic actors alike, but the star is now revealing one of the first future co-stars he was truly starstruck by: Josh O’Connor.
The duo lead “The History of Sound,” which will debut at Cannes after being in the works for four years. The project was first announced in 2021, with a press statement from director Oliver Hermanus (accurately) citing how O’Connor and Mescal were “two of the most promising actors of their generation.”
The shoot was planned for 2022; however, the production was delayed due to financing amid the pandemic and later, guild strikes. The film was instead shot in 2024, after O’Connor and Mescal had already respectively become big stars. Yet Mescal still remembers just how in awe he was of O’Connor at the start of his own career post-“Normal People” success back in 2020.
“We had a sweet Zoom,” Mescal told Vanity Fair about after O’Connor reached out to him as a fan of the series. “He was one of the first people that I was starstruck by after ‘Normal People’ came out. He’s now one of my best friends, and I just adore him.”
Both Mescal and O’Connor later separately became attached to “The History of Sound.” Mescal plays singer Lionel who falls for his fellow New England Conservatory student David (O’Connor) in the adaptation of Ben Shattuck’s World War I-set short story. And Mescal and O’Connor’s friendship only grew during filming the queer romance.
“We felt very boyish in each other’s company throughout,” Mescal said of filming with O’Connor. “I’ve always said this to Josh, but he brings out a childlike version of me. I haven’t felt that kind of degree of boyishness in myself for a long time.”
As for how long it took to bring “The History of Sound” to the screen, Mescal marveled at the er, history of the film itself. “How many times do you hear people who really try and get something made over five, 10, 15 years, and it just falls away?,” Mescal said. “I remember feeling very lucky. Like, we have to enjoy this. Because we’ll come across other opportunities in our life where we love a script as much as this, and we just don’t get to get it made.”
He added, “The thing that I’m most proud about is that the feeling I had when I read the script for the first time is what I got when I saw the film for the first time.”
Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor build a budding wartime romance in the 2025 Cannes Film Festival premiere “The History of Sound.” What you won’t see onscreen are either a tale directly about queer repression circa World War I or any explicit sex scenes, as much as the internet might be hurting for them. Mescal and O’Connor play music students in love and on the road, recording songs from everyday American people, with circumstances and years that force them apart and together yet again.
South African director Hermanus (“Moffie,” “Living”) brings a film to the Cannes Competition for the first time, as does Mescal, the Oscar-nominated actor whose iconic “Aftersun” broke out of the Critics’ Week section in 2022. The filmmaker, adapting a short story from Ben Shattuck who also writes the script, doesn’t make a big gay fuss about the love forming between Lionel (Mescal) and David (O’Connor), demuring in moments that could’ve gone more explicit, instead downplayed here in favor of an understated story that’s also a tribute to folk music.
“I’ve been very lucky with the actors I’ve worked with across my career, with Josh [O’Connor], Andrew [Scott], Jessie [Buckley], Saoirse [Ronan], Daisy [Edgar-Jones], where nothing was ever intentional in terms of how you build a relationship [onscreen],” Mescal told IndieWire over an interview at the J.W. Marriott hotel in Cannes the day before “The History of Sound” premiered at the Palais. O’Connor was not at the day’s press junket, though he’ll be at Cannes at the end of the week for Kelly Reichardt’s “The Mastermind”; he’s currently in his last days of filming Steven Spielberg’s upcoming sci-fi movie in the U.S.
“It either stands on its own two legs, or it doesn’t happen. With Josh, it very much felt comfortable. We knew each other, and we’d been talking about the film since 2020, so that’s when we first initially connected. He’s such a good soul. We’re quite similar in terms of the work that we like and are relatively similar as people. It just grew from there.”
“The History of Sound” grew out of the COVID years as a film project before eventually shooting in New Jersey and also Tarquinia, Italy, in 2024. That the short story wasn’t focused on gay self-loathing or repression appealed to director Hermanus, as well as how the film treats the relationship between Lionel and David with a casualness that belies its potentially upsetting subject matter. It’s World War I times, after all, and both men are scarred by brushes with the draft as they head into the backwoods of Maine together to record sounds.
Ridley Scott’s “Gladiator II,” Mescal’s entrance into franchise filmmaking, had shot the year before, and much press has already been made about the body he had to amass via a workout routine in order to play a swords-and-sandals onscreen hero and fighter (he gained almost 20 pounds of muscle for that film). “A lot of it to me was just trying to get rid of ‘Gladiator’ body beforehand,” Mescal said. “Lionel is somebody who’s not making themselves small, but he’s not at the forefront of conversation. He’s absorbing things.”
“He’s a wallflower,” added Hermanus, acknowledging that Mescal had indeed shed his bulked-up physique for this movie (though there is still a little bit of it there). “Seeing when he’s walking around the house topless,” the director added of one scene, “I was like ‘I can see your spine.'”
Speaking about the early days of the project, Mescal said that initially he wanted to play O’Connor’s character David when he received the script. “I was living with that for probably six months, six, seven months, and then Oliver rang me up and said, ‘Do you want to play Lionel?'” Mescal said. “I was new to the industry at that point, and I thought you would just read a script, and then suddenly within a year it would be happening. So it was an education in that sense. I think I don’t generally have patience, but this project definitely benefited from getting made exactly when it did.”
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The History Of Sound (2025)
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