Ireland Cheers Paul Mescal for Embracing Irish Language (original) (raw)

Movies|‘Bursting Proud’: Ireland Cheers Paul Mescal for Embracing Irish Language

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/24/movies/paul-mescal-irish-baftas.html

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On the red carpet for the British Academy Film Awards, the Oscar-nominated actor gave an interview in Ireland’s national language.

Paul Mescal, the actor, poses for the camera on the red carpet of the British Academy Film Awards. He is wearing a tuxedo for the event.

Paul Mescal at the British Academy Film Awards at the Royal Festival Hall in London. He spoke Irish during a red carpet interview, inspiring a conversation about use of the national language of Ireland.Credit...Dominic Lipinski/Getty Images

Published Feb. 24, 2023Updated Feb. 25, 2023

Paul Mescal, the Irish actor nominated for an Oscar for his performance in “Aftersun,” is a familiar figure on red carpets. But on Sunday at the British Academy Film Awards, he did something he had never publicly done before: He spoke Irish.

Mescal, 27, was walking the red carpet in London when he stopped to talk with TG4, an Irish-language public broadcaster. The interviewer opened the conversation in Irish, also known as Gaelic, and the actor nervously followed suit.

For a man whom the BBC had erroneously identified as British only a few weeks before, it was quite a moment. The two-minute interaction, posted on Twitter, has been viewed one million times and set off a conversation across Ireland about the state of one of Europe’s most endangered languages.

“I found it very emotional,” said Eithne Shortall, an Irish author who lives in Dublin. “The whole country is bursting proud of Paul Mescal.”

The interview resonated in Ireland, where many want to speak the language but may find themselves short on confidence, Shortall said. According to the 2016 Irish census, the latest for which numbers are available, 39.8 percent of the Irish population can speak Irish, which is down from 41.4 percent in 2011. Of the 1.7 million people who said they could speak the language, only 73,803 — 1.7 percent of the population — said they did so daily outside an educational setting.

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