This feature discusses the endings of the films All of Us Strangers and Foe.
“I’m making a habit, in a good way, of getting to promote the films that I love—but also not being available to talk endlessly about them.” Paul Mescal tells me this from afar, on the set of the biggest movie of his career, Gladiator 2. He’d been in production on Ridley Scott’s upcoming blockbuster sequel when the SAG-AFTRA strike began last summer. Then came the long hiatus. During that industry-wide shutdown, Mescal’s two major 2023 movies, Searchlight’s All of Us Strangers and Amazon’s Foe, premiered in Telluride and New York, respectively, launching major fall campaigns. The end of the strike brought Mescal to the US in November for a flurry of press and panels for both films. He didn’t stay in LA long, though: By early December, he was back filming in Malta.
If that progression sounds a little rushed, Mescal is pleased with the way it turned out. The Oscar- and Emmy-nominated Irish actor has seen his star rise very quickly since his 2020 breakout in Hulu’s Normal People, earning a best-actor Oscar nod last year for Charlotte Wells’s little-indie-that-could, the father-daughter drama Aftersun. Accordingly, Mescal’s 2023 movies were highly anticipated, carrying expectations he wasn’t used to. He loved seeing Strangers meet rave reviews out of Telluride over Labor Day weekend, matching his confidence that Andrew Haigh’s ghostly love story would land with both critics and audiences. And he took the far less positive responses to the sci-fi-tinged Foe in stride, following its muted New York debut. (For a sense of the sheer gap between the two, Strangers sits at 94% on Rotten Tomatoes, while Foe, which costars Saoirse Ronan, is at 24%.)
“Something that I’m learning about myself and my taste is that I want people to have really strong opinions—so much, sometimes, that I want to scream,” Mescal says. “It stings a bit when people are talking about [Foe] in a certain context, but that’s just the fact of what making films is…. If I’m lucky enough to have a career that spans it, you want to make choices that are polarizing, because that means the material is innately challenging.” He adds of Foe, “I have zero reservations about the process of making that film.”
Mescal continues to absorb the responses to the two films since they’re only now meeting wider audiences—Strangers began a platform theatrical release around Christmas, and Foe started streaming on Prime Video last week—and they both position Mescal’s characters at the center of game-changing, final-act twists. These surprise endings upend our perception of who we understand Mescal to be playing, exactly: Foe blurs the lines between humanity and artificial intelligence in its exploration of a decaying marriage in post-apocalyptic America, while Strangers blurs the living and the dead in its portrait of a lonely screenwriter (Andrew Scott) meeting a new love interest (Mescal) while reuniting with his long-dead parents (Jamie Bell and Claire Foy).
Mescal’s performances in both films hardly betray these teases of unreality, but they still brim with life, filled as they are with heartbreak and desire. He’s never signaling a gimmick, in line with the movies’ character-driven focus. “Playing a projection was something that I could understand from reading the film, but the minute I read it, I was like, ‘I can’t,’” Mescal says of Strangers. “It’s like, ‘What am I going to do, ghost acting?’ I can’t do that. I’d be too embarrassed.” While he and his cast have been uniformly praised, the final scene—a metaphysical expression of the power of love—has been relatively divisive. Mescal still feels frustrated by some of the reactions.
“People who really respond to it kind of throw the rationale out the window, which is the way to encounter the film—it’s not about looking for what’s real and what isn’t,” he says. “If you watch All of Us Strangers and you become fixated by the reality, you’ve just missed the film! If you’re concerned about, ‘Oh, I feel robbed,’ then you’ve reduced it down to that fact as what the film is about—and it’s not about that.”