Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor brought Oliver Hermanus’s The History of Sound, a romance told through American folk song, to the BFI London Film Festival.
Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor shared the carpet at the Royal Festival Hall on Saturday 18 October 2025, bringing Oliver Hermanus’s The History of Sound, a love story carried by American folk song, to the BFI London Film Festival.
Mescal was born in Dublin in 1996 and raised in Maynooth, where he played minor and under-21 Gaelic football for Kildare until a jaw injury ended it. He first went on stage at sixteen, as the Phantom in a school musical, and he went on to train at The Lir Academy at Trinity College Dublin. Normal People won him a BAFTA in 2020, Aftersun an Academy Award nomination, and his Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire in the West End an Olivier Award.
Ben Shattuck adapted the film from his own short story, first published in a literary journal at Amherst College. It follows two young men, Lionel and David, who set out in the shadow of the First World War to record the lives, voices and music of Americans, collecting folk songs as they go. Much of the writing was done remotely during the pandemic, with Hermanus working from his home in South Africa.
The film had competed for the Palme d’Or at Cannes in May. Both stars had a second film at the Festival: Mescal had premiered Hamnet the week before, and O’Connor had premiered The Mastermind.