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.
“When I read the short story, there was this disinterest in the context of their sexuality,” Hermanus said. “Two people meet in a bar, they connect over so many different things, and they have chemistry and desire for each other. They spend the night together, and the nature of that night is also kind of free… In the bigger picture of queer cinema or queer discourse, it isn’t about repression. It isn’t about the struggle of two people having to take a step that we all know. Any queer person knows that first step that you have to take as a young person, that first step of expressing your desire for somebody of the same sex, not knowing if you’re going to be reciprocated or shamed or harmed, and I’ve made movies about that in the past as well.”
The most physically intimate moment we see onscreen of Lionel and David is a farewell embrace in a train station, the film eschewing sex scenes for a dynamic that’s more furtive, more tacit (though Lionel and David certainly are sleeping with each other, as understood in a couple of moments).
“Maybe it’s a personal taste thing. Even in my previous work, I’ve been very specific about what intimacy is, and what are intimate moments. There is an idea we had in writing this film, which was, I asked Ben, how do we have something that each of them does, which wasn’t in the short, that would demonstrate their love for the other that might be unknown to the other?” Hermanus said. “For Josh, with David, it was this collecting of the pillow feathers, and with Paul, it was the feather he was keeping for the rest of his life. That’s what I feel were intimate ideas rather than a 55-minute sex scene.”
“Thank God,” Mescal, who has put in his time on sex scenes in TV’s “Normal People,” the show that introduced him to the world, added. “I’ve done my fair share of sex scenes, I’m like, ‘been there, done that.’ What feels slightly different about this from [other] romantic relationships onscreen, I would say in the hierarchy of their relationship, physical touch isn’t the priority. It’s intellectual stimulation, it’s friendship. Not that they’re not physically attracted to each other; they very much are, but their chemistry is born from this shared love of these folk songs, and it extends from there.”
Lionel and David at one point, on their voyage, exchange a look that makes for a wounding cinematic moment. “Looking at each other in the tent at the very end,” Mescal said, “that last look in the tent was something that we grabbed in the last 10 minutes of the shooting, because we felt we might need something. I remember calling Oliver and saying, I don’t think I’ve ever looked at somebody with that much love. It was done so quickly. You’re not thinking, it’s not scripted. At that point, it was Josh’s last day, or second-to-last day on set… When you get to that place with actors, I suppose even what’s inside of the story, you can just kind of start to create environments or situations when the actors can play in those contexts.”
Mescal, who is Irish, also had to adopt a Kentucky accent to play Lionel for the film, a first for the “Gladiator II” star. “It’s about finding a reference, somebody you can hook on, and say, ‘That’s what Lionel sounds like, when he’s 60 or 25. We found one off a Kentucky database of somebody talking about the land they grew up on. I said, ‘That sounds like his voice.’ I loved the musicality of the accent that Lionel has. In terms of cultural understanding, there’s not a massive disconnect between that Southern American culture and the gathering of folk songs, it’s not too dissimilar to Irish folk songs. There’s lots of crossover in that regard.”
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.”
“The History of Sound” premiered at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. MUBI will release the film in the U.S. later this year.
