Normal People’s Connell actor reveals devastating suicides at school left him terrified to tackle depression story lines

NORMAL People star Paul Mescal has revealed that devastating suicides when he was a teenager left him terrified of portraying depression.

Paul, who plays Connell Waldron in the hit BBC series, opened up about his real-life experiences during a recent interview and said he felt really nervous about certain scenes.

"My innocence was ripped away very quickly," he said, referring to the suicide of his classmate at secondary school.

"You think you’re a big boy at 14 but you’re not. You’re still a child."

"Three people killed themselves at my school. So it’s not fictional to me, it’s real, and I was really nervous portraying it."

After the first death, Paul’s mother took him out of lessons for a week because he "wasn’t equipped to cope with that level of devastation".

"I wasn’t particularly close to the person, but that kind of sadness permeates through an entire year group," he added.

"The distinct feeling I remember having at the time is that I didn’t know how to perform sadness in the way I saw other people around me being sad.

"I was nervous people didn’t think I was sad enough. I found the whole thing incredibly confusing and, in hindsight, formative."

In Normal People, viewers see Connell spiral into a bout of severe depression after he learns that one of his school friends has taken his own life.

Paul, 24, grew up in County Kildare near Dublin, and revealed he also had a very serious romance as a teenager.

"I had a very intense relationship at the end of secondary school," he said.

"Connell wants to absorb Marianne. He knows where she is sitting in a room without even having to look. I remember that feeling in my body when I was sitting in class and my brain was constantly in tune with this other person.

"And although I wasn’t hiding the relationship like Connell does, I remember worrying, 'What would my friends think if we held hands in the corridor?'"

Normal People is an adaptation of Sally Rooney’s coming-of-age novel, and sees Connell fall in love with Marianne Sheridan (Daisy Edgar-Jones) at the age of 17.

The series has been described as a "millennial love story", which Paul dismissed as "basic" and "reductive".

"I guess it’s to do with fitting words into a small space to describe a novel, fair enough, but that’s not my relationship with it," he said.

"To be brutally honest, most people I know are meeting over apps. That’s not the case with Connell and Marianne. There’s something extraordinary about them and I don’t think they can be labelled as millennial.

"They’re way more interesting than a title like that," he added.

Normal People is available to stream now on BBC iPlayer. Weekly double episodes air Mondays on BBC One from 9pm.