The Watch - What Does HBO Max Mean for HBO? Plus, Paul Mescal of ‘Normal People’

Episode Date: May 15, 2020

HBO Max is set to launch on May 27 with an impressive streaming library (5:29). The streaming service from WarnerMedia Entertainment is a complete break from what HBO has been in the past (12:55). Plus, an interview with Paul Mescal, who plays Connell on ‘Normal People’ (26:15). Hosts: Chris Ryan and Andy Greenwald Read the Variety article on HBO Max here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, it's Liz Kelly and welcome to the Ringer Podcast Network. The Ringer is launching a new podcast from the guys who brought you a Cespitous family barbecue called Baseball Barbecue. Hosted by Jake Mintz and Jordan Schusterman, they're bringing you the good, the bad, and the utterly bizarre corners of the baseball world and everything that makes it special. Throughout the off season, they'll dive into the rabbit hole on some of their favorite fascinations, from the home run derby to baseball brawls and much more. Once the season returns, they'll break down the latest MLB news and developments.

You can subscribe to baseball barbecue on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. I ain't sports to have to clear the room. Stand up and walk now. Hello and welcome to The Watch. My name is Chris Ryan. I am an editor at The Ringer.com. And joining me on the other line, it's Sligo's finest. It's Andy Greenwald.

Thanks for that. Oh, thanks. Chris, they said it couldn't be done. Special show we have today, man. People are really excited for this. Chris, we've been doing this podcast for over eight years. I dare say, people are treating today's show with special guest, normal people's Paul Meskel, as the biggest get we've ever gotten. I know. We've had some historic gets in the past. Gosh, I mean, like, you go through the names, you know, Spoons, Britt Daniel. I had Lindsay Buckingham. That's true. That was a big one. Anthony Bourdain.

Yeah. I mean, we've had some heavy hitters. But maybe nobody as heavy as Paul Meskell, who is on the show today. We talked to him across the pond about normal people, about playing Connell, about really, like, being in Jamie's shadow physically, sexually, in terms of like his clout score. Fan response. Fan response. Just people kind of like forgetting about Connell as they're watching normal people just because they're so distracted by Jamie's, you know, significance. And I got to say, Chris, like, you know me that I am not a superficial guy. You know what I mean?

And so, yeah, is he good looking? Maybe. Maybe. I don't notice handsome. But what I responded to was that Paul was a lovely fellow and a good sport. And it was really fun to talk to him. And, you know, am I regretting that there are photos posted of us next to his youthful Adonis-like visage on the internet? Yeah, a little bit.

Yeah. A little bit. But that's okay. That's okay. I'm a fan of youth. And, you know, when I have people who are the mothers of my daughter's friends commenting on social media, I gasped when they saw who we had. I know we're onto something special. We should probably say up front, and we're going to talk about other stuff before we get to the interview, of course.

Sure. But we should probably say up front that, I mean, I don't think this is a spoiler. We didn't explain the time on the Zoo TV tour when Bono would call the Bush White House to him. Yeah, you essentially pulled a bill on me and you out of my Irish voice work and sort of set me up. Like, you spiked me up there. And I fell a little bit without a net, you know, like I didn't know really which way to go. Paul was a good sport. He kind of wanted to hear the Irish accent.

I didn't deliver. No, but I got to say what you did do. And so I feel like it's worth mentioning this up front so people don't get disappointed. because what you will get instead of Chris's accent, which you can hear on 60% of the other episodes of the watch from 2012 through 2020. That's my rough back of the scorecard math. What you get instead is a remarkable triple Lindy of evasion by you where you, and this is just a veteran savvy. Yeah. It was like judo where you took the hit and you repivited it.

You repositioned yourself and just deflected the energy. It was very impressive. And I think people will notice that moment. One other thing I did want to say, and it's something that has gone unaddressed since we've started doing these podcasts from Quar, is that there was a response on social, which was blah, blah, blah, you know, my gosh, I can't believe you got this. I'm screaming, I'm dying.

It was, do you change clothes, Andy, in the middle of your living room? Because I noticed that where I've been placing the laptop, there is a rack of shirts visible behind me. Because we haven't talked about this on the record. Neither of us are playing backgrounds. We've got nothing to hide. Yeah, I was thinking about this. Because I was thinking about, like, you know,

I just did big picture with Sean and Amanda about, about the best Tom Hardy performances, the Hall of Fame. And I was thinking about I had been working on maybe getting a Bain background going because I'm pretty into Bain these days. And I was like, oh, you know, maybe I'll bring that to the watch, like kind of a new vibe, kind of like a Gotham City backdrop or, you know, Daggett, like the Ben Mendelsohn character could be like hanging out right over here. over my left shoulder. But I just keep it real in here, you know? They don't call it normal people

for nothing. That's who we aspire to be. I just wanted to set the record straight. This is not my living room. This is the garage, basically. It is a place where my wife does work. And also, as you can see, where we store things that we haven't decided what to do with yet, like racks of some clothing and a rug, which has been insusiently askew ever since early March behind me. Insusciantly. I'm using extra vocab to hide the fact. that I've got a rug in my garage. Andy, before we get to our interview with Paul, I wanted to talk to you a little bit about HBO Max.

There is a big story and variety this week. A really exhaustive investigation, not even investigation, but breakdown of the launch of HBO's, HBO Max's service, which is coming on May 27th. And I think it's useful to talk about because we're about to see this. And then a few months after that will be the sort of hard, like the official launch of Peacock. Peacock is soft launch on a couple of Comcast services or, you know, Xfinity 1 plus A Z-Niner. If you have that somewhere, you can see Peacock now.

Did you just, did you say the word Xfinity and then say the name of Elon Musk and Grimes' child? I did. If you have, if you have Xfinity on a rocket made by Tesla, you can watch the office, but otherwise you're out of luck. But, you know, I found this article to be really fascinating. And we can put a link to it in the, in the show notes. But we've been talking about these platforms, I think primarily in terms of their original offerings, like what original programming they're going to be delivering. And HBO Max to me is probably the most formidable entry into the marketplace

in terms of library. Would you agree with that? Absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely. Even in terms of, I mean, the article goes into detail about how the sort of figureheads at the company, including Kevin Riley, and Bob Greenblatt and Sarah Aubrey have kind of taken on this curatorial role of looking through

all of the sort of Warner Brothers, Turner Classic, HBO library. And rather than saying, we're going to pull a lever on May 27th and 55,000 hours of programming are somehow there for you to sift through, they're actually doing this sort of phased, curated approach to delivering this stuff. And I think obviously there's some real big titles, obviously, in the HBO Max library offering. Namely, I mean, you could start anywhere you want friends as 200 plus hours of friends or the Matrix movies. There's tons of titles that we'll get into. But Andy, what do you think about this idea that HBO Max, at least initially, is they're not saying, hey, all the best new shows are here. They're saying all the things you already love are

here. Well, I think it's a smart play, and I think it distinguishes them. And you can see that that's the strategy from the ads that caused a lot of consternation in the very, very, very real and legitimate focus group that is media people on Twitter, where, you know, it was Big Bang Theory and Sopranos together and Batman and Watchmen together. This is a moment where, obviously, a lot of people are still mostly staying at home, have hours to kill and a desire for comfort, and saying that this service isn't, something completely new that you have to just sort of figure out and explore a la Quibi, which we were just talking about earlier in the week. This is saying, we've got you. We've got what you already want. And that's not a bad selling strategy, particularly at this time. I would also say just to make the pivot to the business behind it, the business strategy behind it, which I think is one of the most interesting things about that long feature that you mentioned,

is that, again, unlike something like Quibi or the Peacock paid. version, which will be launching later this summer, HBO Max is an add-on to a service, many of us, and certainly you and I and probably a large number of listeners, already have. So if you pay for HBO, if you subscribe to HBO Now, which is their over-the-top service, meaning not connected to a cable subscription,

you get HBO Max. You will get it. You don't need to do anything to add it to your portfolio of options. That's a pretty incredible, place to start on both ends, I think, on the product end and on the user end, right, where it should slide right into it. And there's a lot of talk in the piece about the UI and what it's going to look like, blah, blah, blah. And that has definitely been a major issue for something like Hulu. It's been a major issue for all of these companies where the streamers because we don't

think about it that much. That's not what our podcast is about. Users don't think about it that much unless it truly is baffling. Yeah, unless it sucks. Like Hulu's. Well, actually, I mean, I've come to kind of, that's the funny thing is I've come to kind of understand Hulu's interface, even though it may not be the most intuitive thing. Everyone, certainly people listen to this podcast, and you know, everyone in my household knows that we've been watching normal people, even if they've accidentally turned it on in a freeze frame the next morning, which is still almost happened. Every time I've turned on Hulu, I have had to go to search normal people. It has not been one of the first 10 shows offered. It's not been recommended for me. I have not

been able to find it. So I'm not, anyway, that's my issue of the year. UI with them. But there was a lot of talk within this article about how HBO Max was going to just use essentially the HBO Go slash HBO Now interface to start with. So people were already familiar with it. So familiarity seems to be the buzzword across the board in terms of both their content and their user experience. And I think that's quite probably a very good thing.

The second piece of this that I wanted to talk to you about that I thought was really interesting was the way that the HBO Max as a product, and as a launch is truly a complete break with what HBO was in the past. And it's not just because the longtime sort of gatekeepers of the company have either been pushed out or moved on, depending on the backstory. But it is an entirely new team doing it.

And in terms of the creative team, Kevin Riley, who's been at Turner and is a veteran of many other companies, Bob Greenblatt, who was at NBC, and before that showtime for many years, Sarah Aubrey, who is with Kevin Riley at Turner. It's that this entire project was driven by the new owners of Warner Media, AT&T, that this was almost purely a tech company, communications company decision,

as opposed to what HBO used to be, which was, and was very proud of, that they were a culture company. They were an arts and entertainment company. They were very much in New York in touch with the Great Masters company that was the jewel box of television. It's not TV. It's HBO. And in fact, now it's not TV. It's not HBO. It's big telecom. And that actually might serve them well in this moment. Because if they had been overly precious, how will we curate and translate the precious HBO experience? I'm not sure they would have been ready to meet the moment.

Because HBO is doing fine. It's the biggest driver of the company, as this article makes clear. But they probably needed someone from the outside, like John Stanky and now these other programmers to come in and say, we need to be bigger, we need to be better, we need to be broader, and we need to be ready in two years, which is, you know, seems like a long time, but the way corporate decision making usually happens, it's incredibly fast. Yeah, it absolutely is. And I think that I'd like to talk a little bit about this because, you know, there's some concern trolling you can do about what's going to happen to the HBO that we've known and loved over the last, you know, 20 years, essentially, if not longer.

but they're essentially going to be keeping both of these properties, both of these, I don't know how distinct they're going to be, but they're going to be under this umbrella. They decided that the HBO name was important enough to make the name of the entire service, which in that article that we're talking about the variety piece, they had some conversations about that. Like maybe it should be called, you know, the Warner Network or the Warner Brothers Network, but like they discussed in the article, I can't remember who says it.

They're like, you know, Warner Brothers has a reputation for quality, but is not a consumer-facing brand. So you don't go to Warner Brothersland the way you go to Disneyland. Which Warner is very happy about in this moment of Canada, by the way. I'm sure they are. I'm sure they are, yeah. But they decided to put all of this under the HBO umbrella, but HBO is a very specific way of working on things. I do think that it sounds like HBO Max is continuing to work in the somewhat hands-on way

that HBO has in the past. I know that HBO has a great reputation with showrunners and with writers and with filmmakers and with artists, but in an era when all you ever hear about Netflix is no notes or they let us go do, make the show, it sounds like within the variety article they're talking about

getting notes about what color scheme should be used for the credit sequences in these shows. So it does sound like they're trying to scale up HBO's thing. Do you think there will be a distinction still between an HBO show and an HBO Mac show for the people who are out there consumers?

I think so. Although it'll be very interesting to see what that looks and feels like. There hasn't been, as far as I know, nothing has jumped ship. Everything has remained thus far in terms of in distinct development pipelines. Casey Boyes is still running HBO. Francesca Orsie is still running drama at HBO. I don't think there's much overlap between what they're doing and what Sarah Aubrey and Kevin Riley are doing at HBO Max.

I would also say that Kevin Riley has a reputation. Kevin Riley, like Paul Meskell, has been on this podcast, has a reputation. has a reputation for being very creative friendly and very creatively engaged. That's not necessarily unique to HBO. That's something that he's tried to cultivate with him everywhere he went, which includes being at FX before leaving to take the Fox job, thus leading to the promotion of his number two, John Landgraf. So there's a good pedigree there as well.

I think what's interesting to me is that level of involvement with what we had long perceived of as Netflix's laissez-faire attitude towards greenlighting. And this is something that's been known in Hollywood for the last year and a half, which is that Netflix was saying no a lot more, despite its reputation. And HBO Max was saying, yes, to almost everything, not, I mean, that's a gross exaggeration, but to a great many things with straight to series orders. But are they also, is Netflix still maintaining its relatively hands-off position? once shows are in production?

Everything that I know about shows that have been in production in Netflix, that seems to be true. Right. Netflix's attitude has pretty much been, go do your thing, we won't share any data with you, we will make you sweat it out and wait it out,

and after three seasons or four seasons, we're pretty much going to say we're done. Like, we've done business together. It's not like you've earned extra seasons, or we love this so much, we're going to keep it going. That does still seem to be run with a kind of technocratic remove.

So what's interesting to me is the collision between the HBO motto, or at least the creative friendly exec way of doing business, which is we're cultivating relationships here, not necessarily raw numbers. We're going to work with you, and we will have built this thing together. How does that work when the tap is just turned on all the way? And you have to micromanage this many properties and also be pursuing a very different type of number game in terms of subs and also in terms of just keeping

everything moving. The outlay that AT&T put behind this is really, really impressive and, you know, billions of dollars, basically. And I think does seem to be in market contrast to what Comcast

Universal is doing with Peacock, which is also they're spending a great deal of money, but their strategy has been a little bit more measured. You know, they are doing a version with ads that is free. And so it's tough to compare them, apples and oranges, basically. But it does seem like HBO Max at least just turned on the tap so much earlier that they will have more things to show you, including things that they could fold in, like search parties, new season, which had been on TBS,

or all the DC Universe stuff, which they continued to make at a great expense. These were not cheap shows. Like Doom Patrol is a really expensive show to make, and it's apparently good, but very few people could watch it because who was subscribing to DC Universe? Well, now we understand why they were continuing to devote all that money to that very niche brand because it's getting folded in too. We've talked about this a little bit a couple weeks ago. I think we even talked about in relationship to the next season and the final season of Better Call Saul.

Do you get the impression that these services launching when they are are basically running in place until production can resume? Because I couldn't help but notice the lack of like a, I mean, so Peacock had an announcement today in Deadline where they listed a couple of shows. that they were going to be launching with. A lot of them looked like co-productions with British production shingles.

They feature British actors, the Evelyn Waugh adaptation for Brave New World. Altos Huxley adaptation for Brave New World. Although, by the way, I would have loved to have read Evelyn Waugh's Brave New World. I feel like that would be much more up there. I always get those two guys confused, even though I'm fully aware of how different they are.

And I was noticing that, you know, HBO Max wanted to launch with a friend. Reunion that they had to postpone because of COVID. So, you know, in some ways, it's great that they're launching with these libraries because who knows when the tap will be turned back on. Yeah, that's the other thing. I mean, and again, I will continue to, and I'm sorry, preface any conversation we have about Peacock with the fact that I'm in business with that company. I am, you know, extending my deal with Universal. So whatever, caveats that you want to make in regards to that are my knowledge of the situation.

But, you know, I think it's notable. It could be spin or it could be true, but everybody's kind of in the same boat at a certain point. Nothing is in production. Nothing has been in production for two months. Stuff that was supposed to be ready isn't going to be ready. And so you could look at that as a disaster, which maybe it is. You could also take the approach that I think Peacock is taking and Universal is taking by saying, we are in this for a marathon, not a sprint. And we have enough legacy content. And we have a business model. that is based on a tiered subscription plan. So there is a free version of this that can generate money for us through ad revenue that we can wait this out. We can test the marketplace. We can familiarize the audience with our brand. They can learn what Peacock is,

what we have there in terms of law and order or the office or what have you. And by the time we have our real slate of originals ready to dazzle you with maybe the audience is there waiting. Maybe the audience is there waiting with more discretionary income too. Who knows?

So it's definitely interesting, but we are, the big takeaway is for all these new services. Everyone is in that early stages. I'm going to do a boxing analogy. No, you should. I'm not capable of doing this, but in my impression of boxing, based purely off of movies about boxing that I've seen parts of, this is the early part of the match when all the fighters are kind of still circling each other, all the fighters. There are many fighters in the boxing ring from what I understand.

It's, yeah. Let me tell you guys about how it worked in the Roman. Coliseum. There would be multiple fighters circling each other, figuring each other out. And they are, on some level, I feel like all these companies, maybe with the exception of Quibi, aren't mad that they can't attack each other yet, that it's really about building up themselves, just learning to walk like a newborn baby foal. Now I'm teaching biology. This isn't, it's going to be delayed bloodsport, is what I'm saying. Sure. Because they need to establish themselves and maybe on some level, certainly not a financial one, but on some level,

these companies might not be mad that they have time to, longer time to roll themselves out and introduce themselves to the marketplace. Before we get into our Paul Meskell interview, do you want to, is there anything you wanted to recommend to folks for this weekend? I wanted to give a quick shout out to a show that's airing on Sunday night on stars that I really like called Hightown that stars Monica Raymond and James Badge Dale and is a crime drama from a writer named Rebecca Cutter and it's directed by Rachel Morrison who is a great director and a great DP.

That is, you know, it's probably a little bit more in some ways traditional than some of the stuff that we typically talk about but is a really, really great bare-knuckle crime drama set in Provincetown in and around the sort of opioid epidemic that's hitting America, obviously,

and is a murder mystery slash crime saga set in and around the Cape there, which I thought was really cool. It's really great sense of place and some really awesome performances in that. Is there anything you're looking forward to this weekend? We don't recognize weekends around here. I don't know what that is.

I checked out the Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt Interactive movie, which I highly recommend for people who are fans of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. I don't know if it's worth it if you aren't. It was interesting to me because this is Netflix's second ventured down the old Choose Your Adventure Highway after the contentious,

I would say, reception that Black Mirror's Bandersnatch got. In some ways, this is probably a better use of it because everything in the Faye slash Carlock verse is always so heightened and metatextual

and aware of itself and goofy. You know, 30 Rock invented, well, certainly didn't invent it, The Simpsons was doing it for 20 years before, but 30 Rock definitely perfected the use of the cutaway gag in a live-action sitcom. Right.

And so applying the interactive thing to it works. What I did find in watching it was creators still want to create, and they cannot let go. And I don't blame them. You know, I think that it would be catastrophic to do a drama this way, even though I'm sure someone is going to do it eventually. If you choose,

I'm just going to pull an example out of my hat, Titus getting up on stage at a redneck bar in West Virginia and singing not Leonard Skinner's Free Bird, but Free Bird, a song that he sang at a bargain basement pet store in order to attract customers resulting in a police incident. You're greeted by a then like a character appearing over black screen and being like, you messed up. Yeah. You better go back to the last time you made a decision. So you're still more than, it's not gently nudged back onto a kind of narrative track, but in terms of an hour spent with some fun new technology and the just almost nihilistically relentless joke machine that that show has become, they're a worse way to spend your time.

Okay. So we got those two things for people to check out. We'll wrap it up there on Monday. We'll be back. I actually have an interview with James Badgerdale from Hightown on Monday. So that's cool. Yeah, and we hopefully will keep the parade of guests coming. It's going to be hard to top this guy, though. Can I say that just a little bit of behind the scenes? So when the interview is over, this is the thing about Zoom etiquette that I don't really know about. I'm a hard Zoom eject guy. Right.

You prove that, and I don't mind it because we're in their homes. They're in our homes. Yeah. And so, you know, when we have guests in the studio, we always have a nice time chatting with them before and after. like we talked about, we had Katie Crutchfield from Waxahatchie. We ran into her or she found us at the commissary on the studio lot, and we had 10 minutes that I wish we had the microphones on. Sure, sure.

That's not happening in Zoomverse. So the interview comes to an end, and Chris hits the eject button radically fast. He's just gone. I just thought that that was what we were doing. You know, like, I thought like we were going to end it with this guy. He was like, great, great to see you guys. And I was just going to be like, peace out. I don't want to like hover, you know?

No, I get it. And so I was going to do the same thing, but I was looking for the leave meeting. Yeah. And then he just starts talking more. And I assumed he was talking to his publicist. Yeah. He wasn't. He was talking to me. And then I think I couldn't, is he lonely? Are we all lonely in quarantine? Because I then like, was like, okay, thank you so much. You know, sure. Yes, we'll definitely talk more. And I got out of there. And then I spent the rest of the day being like, maybe he just wanted to chat more. I know. I fucked up. you know, if Sally Rooney had written my internal monologue after the interview, it would have been riveting stuff. Yeah.

Talking about it more isn't. So let's get into our interview with America's sweetheart. The world's sweetheart. Paul Meskel. All right. See you Monday, man. Andy and I are so happy to welcome Paul Meskell to the watch. He has been like one of our favorite performers this year watching him in normal people as Connell.

And Paul, I'm so glad you took a minute. talk to us here, man. How you doing? No, I'm, I'm so good and so delighted to be on with you guys. Yeah, it's been, it's been a crazy, what is it, three, four weeks now at this point. But yeah, it's great to still get the opportunity to talk about the show. And yeah, really excited. So Andy and I were joking about how we've really, we've been talking about normal people a lot over the last couple of weeks, almost to the point where we've kind of like run out of angles to hit here. But we were thinking about, I think we're ready to pivot to Jamie. You know, I think we've really decided maybe it was Jamie's story all along.

That guy needs a sequel. That guy needs a sequel. That guy needs to be in a lot of therapy and be removed from the equation. I didn't say it, but no. But I do think that in the pursuit of a new angle on the show, if you've been speaking about, you know, Conlon and Marianne's potentially doomed romance for weeks, I think it's time for the hard pivot to what about Jamie? We need to talk about Jamie.

Yeah, we all do. You need to talk about Jamie. No, look, what's so? Like, what I'm finding great joy when people talk about Jamie is that Fionn, who plays Jamie, he's one of my best friends. And to see the vehement hate he is receiving, I just keep messaging and being like, you are clearly doing something amazingly right. So congratulations. But, yeah, he's an amazing actor.

And to get kind of elicit that response from an audience is incredible. It was almost a, not a mistake, but everyone almost did their job too well because all of the other actors on the show are so good at being so wrong for Marianne. It almost clears the lane for Connell. Yeah. No, they do all the work for us. We just have to show up. But, no, the ensemble cast that Louise and Lenny assembled, Louise is the wonderful casting director who's involved in the start. but you really get a sense.

Because it's a visual medium, it's not a book that you're seeing real people with real faces and real stories behind them. And I think everybody plays them so well. You know, I watched the show a couple weeks ago, obviously, so that Andy and I could talk about it and it's one of my favorite shows of the year. But my wife, who also loves the show,

is having a hard time finishing it because she loves the characters so much it's almost hard for her to endure it because she cares about them so much. I was wondering whether you've ever had that with a show or a film or a book where you kind of empathize or connect with the characters so much

that you're almost trying to hold on to it and not let it go. Yeah, I think for me, when it starts to turn south in Blue Valentine, I don't want to turn it off, but I can't stop watching it. watching it. So that's like minute six of Blue Valentine. That's minute four actually. Yeah. No, but like what kills me is the way that that film is structured, like the way

when it takes that kind of big hiatus in the middle of the film to like really go into like Brian Gosling knocking on the nursing room door to then onto the bus, all of that stuff feels really isolated and then it just starts deteriorating. And it's like when he gets and throws the ring out into the, that's when I'm like, I have to turn this off. I can. But I weirdly watch it kind of annually and I curse myself for doing it. But that's one that's one that I was like, I'm fine. It's probably slightly different in that sense because the pain of what we're enduring

on February difficult to watch, but incredibly enthralling and the performances in it are insanely good. Yeah. But films like that, when it's like, which normal people is similar in that sense, it's pretty much in it's an A story. There's no kind of B storylines. It's about Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling's characters and nothing else is in primary focus at any other point. And I think that gives an audience a real opportunity to step in and be a part of their lives for a little time. So it's a lot of light escapist fare around your house during quarantine. Totally. That's,

my favorite pastime is watching sad movies. So I wanted to ask you about, the origins of your performance as Connell in normal people. Obviously, you like many others who had a chance to become familiar with the material before the show had the book as a text, and I guess I'm wondering if you had read it before you spent time studying it. But the main thing that I took away from reading the book and then was just so blown away by your performance is how much of this person is internal. The book gives us such a window into his internal life and his struggle and how much is happening inside versus how little is happening outside for so much of it. So I have a couple follow-ups specifically about your craft in regard to that idea,

but I guess just starting there, like the beginning, your entrance into this character and how you begin to construct someone that is so rich internally and so ungiving, ungenerous, let's say, at the beginning externally. Yeah, I think what I, when I saw that normal people was going to be a I was like, okay, God bless those poor actors who have to communicate so much by not. Like, it's so funny when I sat down with Sally for the first time after I'd been cast, she was like, the hard thing for me in regards to Connell is writing words for him to say because he doesn't, in the novel, he doesn't speak a huge amount, particularly in the early stages. And then after that kind of fear, my own personal fear subsided, I was kind of like, okay,

this is actually a real gift because oftentimes. scripts are overly didactic in terms of explaining characters, feelings, thoughts, wants, and actions. Whereas with this, there's an opportunity to live with a character for a long period of time and slowly allow the audience in. And that's, I think, a real gift and isn't common a lot of the time. So for me, in terms of preparing for that, it was a lot of rereading and reading the books and isolating those thoughts that are happening to them internally in all of those scenes. particularly in the early stages. And it was about kind of the thoughts being as available to me as the script was

because the kind of with a lot of things, the thoughts generally are the things that motivate your choice to speak. And what Sally has done with that book is she's given you a real clear mental roadmap of how Connell's brain works, I think. And that was my way into it. So were there lines in particular from the book thoughts that Connell has in the that you would keep at the forefront of your mind while performing that weren't even necessarily

given voice in the script? Yeah, I think so. I think that's, for me, that's what's interesting about acting anyway. It's not about memorizing the lines and saying them. It's about figuring out what is either a, eliciting a response from your character or B, what is the things that you're not saying?

What are the things that are like popping into your head? what is the thing that your body wants to do and how are you also trying to appear like a real person who's unfazed by this, which Connell does a lot. He just puts up this kind of stoic, yes. I still feel that Connell is available to an audience even though he's not really available to himself a lot of the time.

Yeah, well, that's because you do something that just blew me away over the course of the series. It's not just the words that seem sometimes to be fighting out from a deeper place. It's that sometimes breath or sounds come from you. as part of your performance. And I make it sound sillier than it is, and it's actually quite moving.

It feels as if things are escaping like steam from a kettle at times. And that suggests that kind of internal life. And I imagine you, like many other actors, don't like to diagram exactly what you were doing, because it might not be as conscious as that.

But I'm curious about that, because it's very prevalent over the course of the series and very powerful. Yeah, I actually don't know what that is. but I know that generally if I was listening, if I was actively listening to Daisy in a way that was true and real, she would say things,

she says things to Connell, like in that first scene with Marianne, and she's like, you should give me grinds, Connell. That scares the shit out of him. And if I'm really listening to that, I might not have a line or I might, nothing might come out,

but if I'm, like, I suppose those noises or grunts or inhales or exhales aren't scripted and I was just really glad that Lenny and Hetty seemed to like that being involved with this character and it's also in the book like Sally kind of details his grunts and kind of inhales

and that being a thing but it wasn't something that I didn't prepare what those sounds sounded like at the same time. One of my favorite couple of moments happened a little bit earlier in the season when you're first at Trinity and I talked to

when I had Lenny Abramson on we talked about these moments. But those quick things where you're reading in the library or walking across campus with your backpack, actually, to me, or is almost as informative as some of the dialogue scenes that you have during those episodes. I really loved just watching the character acclimate himself to these new surroundings and this new environment, because it was really resonant, you know, as somebody who's left town to go to another town a couple of times, but especially at that period in your life where you're like kind of pretending to be somebody. But you're also trying to figure out, I was wondering, like, do you, this may be silly, but do you stay in character when you know that what you're doing is essentially these connective tissue shots to show this is what Connell does on like a day-to-day basis? He's in the library. He's walking. Are you thinking as Connell as you're doing those things?

Yeah, I think any time that you're in front of the camera and it's recording. Yeah. The secret is like right now. That's the secret, guys. Like right now. We're all basically peers here, I guess. Yeah, sure. Yeah. Often I find those shots harder to do because you're kind of like, then you're really attending the forensic detail of the characters. You're like, what am I thinking about as I'm walking in through the college gates?

And I remember that that scene in particular, I think it was written, there was a kind of more ominous feeling on the page when Connell first walks through the gates of Trinity and I think it's framed so wonderfully in the show because for, You guys, I don't know if you know about Trinity, nor do I think you have to to feel how big that moment is for him.

And for like somebody who went to Trinity, I know that feeling of walking through the arches. It's like people talk about it. But on the page, it was kind of written that he was uncomfortable with where he was. But I think that moment, remember talking to Lenny about it. And I was like, I have this feeling that when he's walking in here, no matter how heavy he's feeling or what he's trying to do,

wrestle within his mind. This is a moment that he has dreamt of. So there's like a small moment where he's kind of half smiling to himself and he looks up and he goes, I have achieved this. I have arrived in this place. And that to me is something that you can actively play. That's something that is that choice comes to you when you're trying to address how this character is feeling when he's walking into a place. And when you're reading, I'd like to like typically read like when they're setting up, like read the book. Sure. In it so you're not going on action and reading.

Yeah. But yeah, those little ones are tricky to play because it's really hard to individualize the character at those moments, but that's the challenge of it, I suppose. I know, Paul, you've done a lot of work on the stage. And when I've spoken to or heard interviews with people who do a lot of stage work, one of the things that they like to talk about is the privilege of sort of growing and developing along with the production, you know, that you get another crack at it the next night. and the next night, and by the end, maybe you've almost figured it out.

One of the things Chris and I've talked about in regards to normal people is how unique it is as a TV story, because it is so laser-focused on these two characters over a very specific amount of time. We get to see these performances just blossom and change and develop with this richness. You know, obviously you're just working. It's different scenes. It's in a different time, but you and Daisy, you're just kind of working the same furrows with each other in a way that is really amazing to watch. You can hear the architecture of my question trying to find some connection between. stage acting and what you've done on normal people.

And this is the moment when I bail out and hit the escape pod and hope you can help me figure out something there. You can land it, man. Come on, you got it. I was wobbling. I was wobbling. I was almost across the Atlantic. Paul and I are your wingmen. We're going to land it right on the Navy cruiser. Yeah, no, I think I know what you're saying in the sense. And I say, I think, loosely. That's all I can hope for these days.

No, but it's not that you get to revisit. visit the scenes as you do on stage, but almost, it's, like, but it's even in the way that it was shot, like there was scenes, say, say, for example, you know, the scene in episode 11 where they're eating the ice lollies and it starts with them watching the match and it finishes with them, with Marianne running away from the house. So there was... Does anything happen in between? I don't remember.

The second half of the match starts. So I'm really like, And Connell's very focused on that. Anyway, please continue. Happily ever after. But there was one shot in particular that was like it was placed behind the TV. And because of the nature of that room, it was quite small. There was nobody else in the room other than me and Daisy. The door was shut.

They hid the microphones out of shot. And so you're doing a 15, 16 minute take where you go from sitting down to talk. talking about the relationship to having sex to that event happening during the sex to then running away and then feeling like

Connell has fucked it so that feels that felt like what it feels like to me when I'm on stage that's a definite way like I can draw a massive similarity

between shooting scenes like that but also just living with the character for that period of time felt like doing a long run of a play the only difference was are not repeating scenes.

I think it's also interesting because I'm sure, whether it's today's long day of press or the few weeks of press you've had, a lot of people who watch a show like this that is so focused on the relationship between two characters, I'm sure you and Daisy have had a lot of questions about your friendship and, you know, et cetera, et cetera. But I guess what I'm curious about

is the professional relationship in the best possible way when you are not just scene partners, but you are working together so intimately where you have to know each other's rhythms, right? And so in a scene like that, I was actually going to bring that scene up in regards to another question about just times

when, you know, in what it felt like for you to look up and know that the person across from you was catching what you're pitching. If you know, you know, it was there to pick you up, to back you up and to understand you. But it's so funny that you even mentioned that

because one of my, and I'm going to misquote it, but there's a quote in the book when Conno La Marianne, I think, are talking about the conversations that they have around the sexual encounters that they're having. I think it's either from Conall or Marianne's perspective

about it feels like they're figure skaters and when they're having these conversations, somebody's being thrown up into the air and they just know they're going to be caught and then that improves the conversation and improves the sex that these characters are having. And I can't imagine doing the job and not trusting the person that I was acting opposite.

Like Daisy is just extraordinarily good at her job. The energy that she brings to set and just the way that she interrogates her own character and the relationship and also there was just a really nice energy

between the two of us when because you can't I don't know what I learned from Daisy is that shooting something for that length of time is a marathon but it feels like a sprint and watching her navigate a day on set was brat like I didn't know what a day on set really looked like

and just watching her and seeing her energy shift as we'd be getting closer to a take and then taking that right down, but still being incredibly personal and personable, being incredibly funny and just a really positive person to be around. Also, I just learned a huge amount from her as an actor and even more as a person. So I think the relationship that we had really benefited the characters and allowed us to work as best as we could. I actually had a question because I actually did, this is irrelevant to my question, but I actually did get a chance to live in Ireland for a little while when I was in like the late 90s,

but in Cork. Oh, lovely. I love Cork. Yeah. And I had a blast there, but I. Chris is being modest. He also does a great Irish accent. I do a terrible Irish accent.

I refuse to speak unless you do the accent. Only if you do American. I was because you can do your American accent back to us. but I was curious about whether or not you had spent much time in Sligo as a kid or growing up and whether or not you had like preconceived notions about like, oh, guys from Sligo are like this. Because I know you're from like sort of outside of Dublin, right? Like about 30. Yeah, but I think there's a weird thing in Ireland that people probably won't agree with.

But there's everybody who lives in Dublin and then there's the rest of Ireland. Okay. And where I'm from, where I'm from is definitely not Dublin. but my father's from West Clare, which would be similar to Sligo, obviously different, but we went on holidays to Sligo growing up quite a bit because there's lovely beaches and things like that. So, yeah, I was familiar with the world,

and I wasn't from Dublin, so I would never be judgmental of people who lived outside of it. Sure. Yeah, no, I think in the States here, it's like, even if you're only three hours from a place, it's the same thing. You're like, well, guys from New York are people from Boston, or people from, you know, Washington, D.C. are just different than people from Philadelphia in some way.

Like, they have a different attitude about things or different food. And I was curious as to whether or not, like, you almost had to get into the character of playing someone from Sligo at times or if there was anything about being from there that attitudeally changed. Well, I think it's interesting about Connell is he is absolutely from that place. But his moral compass is not that that he shares with his friends or his peers. He's very much his own man as much as he struggles with a lot of things. He doesn't, like, for example, when Rob shows him in the photo of his girlfriend, he doesn't, that's not a culture in which he wants to be involved with. So I think as much as he can be frustrating, he does have a certain morality to him that I find very attractive. Classic Slago guy, just showing pictures of his girlfriend.

Only people in Sligo do that. You get to Sligo, they're like, see a picture of my girlfriend. I know we haven't met yet. Paul, do you think, do you think Connell's a good writer? Was that something you considered? Yeah, absolutely. I think, I think that's one thing that you really have to consider, because ultimately, if he doesn't think in himself that he's a good writer, him losing those opportunities won't hurt as much. But if he genuinely believes that he has the capacity to succeed, those rejections are going to sting. And I think he's got all, when I look at writers and the writers that I know, he possesses the same outward qualities that they have.

He's slightly backfooted. He's incredibly internalized. He absorbs the world around him and analyzes detail minutely. And I think I definitely like to think that he will be and is a successful writer. Do you think he mostly writes about Jamie? He has three novels dedicated to Jamie. And they're just called Jamie Part 1, Jamie Corrective, and Jamie Part 3. Jamie's struggle.

Volume 5. The end of the series, more or less matches the end of the book, although I think there are some very clever decisions made in regards to how the news of the scholarship is presented and the way that it's lived on screen. As the person who has spent the most time with Connell, maybe even more than Sally Rooney has. How do you feel about the ending? Does it feel appropriate to you? Does it feel happy to you? Where do you land on it, both as a participant in it and then maybe someone who's even watched it? I think that tonally the ending of the series fits the show that we made.

I think it is incredibly joyful and something to be celebrated. I think it is also something that makes me very sad. And I can't describe to you why I feel sad because ultimately what they're doing is the right thing. But I think from Connell's perspective, I think the reason, and I've interrogated this a little bit, is the reason that I feel sad for Connell is that he's finally gotten to the point

where he is happy-ish with who he is. He's in a position where he can express love and intimacy with the person that he loves. and people are starting to like his work as a writer. And those things have just kind of crystallized for him and suddenly he knows in his heart of parts that he can't exist there anymore. And the person that he loves is telling him to go

and he agrees with her. That's a painful, like even me saying that is a painful thing to articulate. It's not something I ever would want for me, but it's also everything that I want for me. Do you know, does that make any sort of thing? Yeah. It doesn't.

And yet while that melancholy, Collie is a, I think, a very appropriate place to sort of sit and leave the series. How quickly did you pitch normal people to East Village Nights? Look, I know nothing of season two. But in my, like, I've said this quite a bit. I don't see Connell as a fictional character. In my eyes, he's a real, he's probably finishing up his masters in New York as we speak. Yeah.

It's, that's a weird, I've never had that relationship to a character where I'm like, I feel. so protective over him and I also, the selfish part of my actor's brain is like of course I want to continue playing in. Of course, but I also know that with TV,

when you make something that has had this response, sometimes it's best to just let it sit. And the wonderful thing about these characters is that they're still living and breathing. They will still have interesting lives at 30, 40, 50, 60. And it's whether Sally or people decide that it's something

that they want to interrogate. But I also, But yes, I fully support that, and I'm happy to go on records. In the week of season two, I will be very happy. But I'm also totally behind the fact that if they want to finish it there, that last scene, there's a lovely finality to it while still saying that they are going to let go on and be in each other's lives in some capacity. And I think for the show to strike that balance is a really hard thing to do. I wanted to ask you about, I had been reading some interviews with you before we did this,

and I saw that you are a big true detective fan as a, as am I. And I saw that you had rewatched it during quarantine. Is that right? Yeah, it was the first thing I watched in lockdown to rew out to you, man. And so did you do first season or are you, do you go deeper into it? I'm a first season guy and pretty much only a first season guy. I do like season three. And I think there's good acting in season two, but I think season one has spoiled television, Petra because it's so good. I'm still pretty hung up on season one. Can I be sitting here just riding for Colin Farrell's cocaine binge scene in season two? There's some peaks, yeah, for sure.

I mean, if this can transition into just some professional advice, that's your North Star going forward. I know. Yeah, absolutely. That's normal people too. That's normal people, too. Colin doing loads of cocaine at the desk in New York. As a sheriff, yeah. Instant green light.

I'm sorry, Chris, ask your question. No, no, I was just going to ask, like, when you were watching True Detective, even the first time. Were you a pretty, like, obsessive fan? Did you, like, go online and look at theories and stuff like that? No, I was obsessed with it from an actor's standpoint. I was obsessed with the series, and I was obsessed watching how Matthew McCona and Woody Harrelson played these characters.

How well they were written, how much the series trusts, doesn't do a huge amount of exposition, if any exposition at all. It trusts the actors at the center of it to really, get in under the fingernails and act. And I love watching that. So you and I probably were not on the same Reddit boards then. You were more into the acting. Yeah, I was doing the whole geeky.

I was more into like, where is Carcosa? Is it more of... But they made that world feel so real. And I don't have to know if it is or it isn't. But that reveal, I think, in episode seven with the videotape. and just that close shot on Matthew McGahn or Woody Harrelson watching it. Yeah.

I was like, this is a real thing. Somebody called the police. We need to open up that cold case and solve it. And I think for a television show to manufacture that is incredible. Well, I personally cannot wait until Connell Waldron is in New York, joins the police force, true detective season four. Yeah, yeah.

That's the way we make it happen. Paul, thank you so much for joining us today, man. I really appreciate it. Thanks very much for having me on, guys. And congratulations to you, too. It is just, it's an incredible performance. And Chris and I have just been talking. We're so excited to see what's next for you and to keep watching.

Thanks very much, guys.