Gladiator II star Paul Mescal has finally addressed a longstanding and rather bizarre relationship rumour after months of speculation on social media.
If you hadn’t already heard, rumours sprung up on TikTok last summer that the 28-year-old actor would have one night stands with women, then take them for a walk at a local park only to ditch them by pointing out a landmark then sprinting away.
It was a bizarre claim most reasonable people dismissed as total fiction; now, Mescal has set the record straight, calling the rumours “categorically untrue” in a new GQ interview.
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Though he and his siblings had a good laugh over the TikTok videos, Mescal’s mother didn’t take them as well.
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“The one thing that upset me was that I was in the kitchen, I remember my mum looking at the videos and she was getting upset. Isn’t that devastating?” the Normal People star told GQ.
“It’s funny to us—my brother, me, my sister—because we know that this is the way the internet works … if you’re a mother, her impulse is to come out and be like, ‘He wouldn’t do this.'”
Though Mescal himself wasn’t too bothered by these outlandish rumours because he knew they were totally untrue, he confessed all the speculation about his private life can affect him.
That’s why the star – who is believed to be dating singer Gracie Abrams – sets firm boundaries about what he is and isn’t willing to share with the press, the public and even his most loyal fans. Including his love life.
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“I’m not comfortable inviting any access into that part of my life,” he told GQ.
“How I am in my private life is so precious to me because I get very little of it, and it might be public interest, but it’s not public-obligated information.”
Mescal typically plays his love life very close to the chest and keeps his personal life to himself, both because he’s entitled to and for the sake of his own sanity.
The star also believes that keeping his private life private helps him really embody the characters he plays on our screens because the people watching don’t know so much about him as a person that it changes the way they perceive him playing a character.
It’s a refreshing approach to stardom in the age of social media, when stars are more accessible than ever.
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