//

Interview: Paul Mescal and Emily Watson on the Faith and Familial Fallout of God’s Creatures

Paul Mescal and Emily Watson discuss the specifically Irish textures of the film’s story.

Paul Mescal and Emily Watson on the Faith and Familial Fallout of God’s Creatures
Photo: A24

“I’d rather just reel the years back in,” says Emily Watson’s Aileen O’Hara in God’s Creatures, “and sit you and your father down to make you act like adults.” The wistful response is prompted by a question asked by her son, Paul Mescal’s Brian, of where she’d go if she could escape their small Irish fishing village. But unlike her offspring, who fled to Australia for seven years in search of fulfillment, Aileen seeks solace in a mythically harmonious past by conjuring an impossible image of the quarrelsome men in her family.

Anna Rose Holmer’s follow-up to The Fits, co-directed with that film’s editor, Saela Davis, also explores how the natural world reacts in response to women who deny or ignore human instinct. Holmer’s Cincinnati-set debut feature was a menacing yet ultimately magical tale of an 11-year-old girl discovering the mysterious transformational quality of puberty. No such comfort exists in God’s Creatures, where Watson’s middle-aged mother willfully ignores the sexually abusive behaviors of her son in search of an ever-elusive harmony inside her home.

Something shifts in the cosmos and the community when Brian faces an accusation of sexual assault against one of Aileen’s factory co-workers (Aisling Franciosi). Faced with the choice between protecting her son and telling the truth, Aileen provides a false alibi for Brian’s whereabouts. The choice throws the world into chaos, a slowly brewing storm in which Holmer and Davis ratchet up tension through evocative imagery and expressionistic soundscapes.

Yet all the aesthetic fury of God’s Creatures would amount to hollow sturm und drang were it not anchored in Watson and Mescal’s committed, confident performances. Each actor renders their character’s silent struggle to see their family member for who they really are with the follies of their respective life stage. A quarter-century after her debut screen performance in Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves, Watson continues to find fresh perspectives on women whose iron-willed tenacity clashes with the social structures under which she operates. Mescal, meanwhile, continues to complicate the “nice guy” image cultivated by his role as Connell in TV’s pandemic breakout miniseries Normal People. With this and Charlotte Wells’s forthcoming Aftersun, he’s bringing an exciting new interiority to brooding young masculinity.

I spoke to Watson and Mescal prior to the theatrical and digital release of God’s Creatures. We chatted about the specifically Irish textures of the film’s story, the necessity of acting independently from any aesthetic choices made in post-production, and the connections they draw between the film and Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire as Mescal prepares to begin rehearsals for an upcoming London revival of the play.

Advertisement

The film’s title comes from a line, “we’re all God’s creatures in the dark,” that ends one scene, so it doesn’t get unpacked. What does the title mean to each of you?

Emily Watson: It’s a very easy phrase in Ireland, isn’t it? I think it’s about not judging people.

Paul Mescal: Yeah, I also think it’s about private [things]. The context is Francie [played by Brendan McCormack] and talking about a kind of primality and what happens when you switch off the proverbial light. What happens when you’re away and when you’re private?

EW: There’s a part of film that’s about religion allowing you to abdicate personal responsibility. [Aileen] knows that her faith brings her son back to her, and he’s beautiful and amazing and everything that she’s ever wished for. The prospect of him being taken away is unconscionable, so she don’t do the right thing. And then, at the end, her faith allows her to let him go.

As I was reading up on the film, someone had mentioned there was something particularly Irish about mothers defending their sons with false alibis. Is there a specific local context that can help us understand why Aileen lies for Brian?

PM: The inception of the story came from Fodhla [Cronin O’Reilly], our producer, and was rooted in real-life events in South Kerry. But I don’t feel like the mothers and the alibis with their sons are innately Irish things. I think it’s a perspective that I’m not used to seeing on film: putting the focus on the mother when the act is happening between her son and somebody else.

EW: I think it speaks to the fact that the women in the societal structure are very enabling. Aileen is very enabling of Brian’s behavior in so many ways, not just the sexual violence.

I understand screenwriter Shane Crowley wrote extensive character biographies. Was that helpful to align on backstory?

EW: I think it was very useful, wasn’t it? I mean, obviously we all brought our own stuff to it.

PM: I don’t think I had a biography.

EW: Well, we talked with him because there’s a lot of implied history in the family, that there’s been violence, there’s been tension. And it’s never really explained, but we needed to find a way to understand why it was there. It’s very much there in all those family scenes. You can feel it’s about to go off at any minute.

PM: Yes, for sure. It was specific insofar as what was useful to us. Shane is incredibly thorough. You would ask him a question about what you think happened on his 15th birthday, and he would have an answer. Shane’s an artist who’s very gentle. He’ll give you the information, but he won’t impose his process onto us.

EW: One thing he gave to me that was useful was that Aileen didn’t want to leave. She had brothers who had left and come here, and she’d come to visit them. There’d been lots of tension. They lived a very stressed kind of New York life. And she went, “Why would anybody want to live here when they can be on the Wild Atlantic Way?” She loved the place. She loved her place.

Advertisement

There’s so much expressionistic visual and sound design in the film. From your perspective as actors, were you aware of whenever those sorts of things would be added on top of your performance?

PM: I think the tone of the script, as you read it, matched what I saw. I definitely wasn’t aware of the sound design when we were making it, or the editing choices. But I think, that being said, it still felt true to the core rules.

EW: I think they had very strong aesthetic principles running while they were directing it, but we were never made to feel that that was intruding in our process in any way. It felt very actor-centric. We had a very in-depth and profound conversation about all the emotional issues that were in every scene, then they handed the scenes to us to play. And they observed it, which is a beautiful process. It’s not always like that.

What is it like watching it back and then seeing how they’ve slotted you into their design?

PM: The first viewing is always like a…

EW: …headfuck!

PM: It’s just like, “Whaaaaa!” I spoke to you a couple of days after you’d seen it first, and you were frazzled.

EW: I came out of it going, “I’m in a tumble dryer. I don’t know what’s going on. I don’t understand.” I couldn’t really quite articulate what I’d seen. And I was frazzled, so I had to go and see it again before I was like, “Oh, I see! I get it, I understand.” Because it changes a lot between what you shoot and what ends up in the film.

Paul Mescal and Emily Watson on the Faith and Familial Fallout of God’s Creatures
Paul Mescal in a scene from God’s Creatures. © A24

While God’s Creatures is rooted in the specifics of the research you did to portray people from this fishing village, there is an almost folkloric element to the to the story. Does it change the way that you think about the characters if they can also stand in for something so much larger?

EW: I don’t think you ever play something larger. You always play the truth of the situation. But the stakes become so incredibly high that it sort of elevates you, in a way, to a place that’s very dramatic.

PM: And, I think, and I don’t know if you agree, but I handed that bit over the directors and let them be in control that kind of tone. I’m aware of it, but I don’t think that can be nearly impossible to play as an idea.

EW: Yes, yes. And I think there were probably a whole range of versions of the end that were more or less emotional or dramatic, and they’ve calibrated that in their choices.

Advertisement

Both of your characters have a critical emotional scene in the shower. How do you approach playing such a literal moment inside a space that takes on an almost liminal property through our observation?

EW: Yeah, it was just a very private moment where she grieves because she can’t really ever express what she’s feeling to anybody because she’s the only person who’s ever going to know what actually happened. It’s about grief. And you’ve seen him in the shower, so there’s a sort of connection there.

PM: I feel like Brian’s moment is very different and feels less loaded. I think it’s consciously so because I don’t think he’s having as emotional a response to the events that happened the night before as he probably should.

EW: But it’s loaded with evidence.

PM: Yeah, absolutely.

EW: When you go back to it, you go, “Ooh.” And that connects, to me, the moment you know that I wash his clothes from that night. He’s left them on the floor, then the moment of shock when he comes out for the dressing of the boats and he’s putting that red shirt on again.

PM: It’s great. There’s a real visceral response to that.

EW: It’s probably a detail that [people] might not notice!

Emily, as I was preparing for this, there was a bit of advice that I think you shared from Stellan Skarsgård on the set of Breaking the Waves: “Don’t aim for anything. Just let go.”

EW: Yeah, it’s actually very good advice, particularly if you’re floundering. If you’re trying, if you’re really striving for something, and it doesn’t feel like it’s working…I’m just like, “Okay, give it up.” Let go. See what happens.

What’s the process of disconnecting from a film as heavy as this? Do the characters stay with you? Do you imagine what happens to them after the end of the film?

EW: I taught myself over the years to deliberately process and let go. Even if it’s all fiction, it leaves a residue in your body. You’ve been walking down neural pathways that affect you. It’s like if you’ve had a good cry, you can feel it in your body. It’s a thing. I just had a day in Donegal at my house where I just listened to the music and just sat in the quiet and try to breathe it on out before I went home to the chaos of teenagers.

Advertisement

Paul, you’re off to perform in A Streetcar Named Desire soon on stage. Are you able to pull anything from this film or any of the recent roles you played, which have provided such an interesting cross-section of masculinity? Obviously, that role is so loaded with a legacy around the construction and performance of gender.

PM: Yeah, I feel like the play is not a surprise…or it shouldn’t be a surprise. Like, people know what happens! In terms of how I’m approaching it, I’m fighting the urge to do something different just for the sake of doing something different. I think it’s important to just understand and know why Marlon Brando’s performance was so good and not feel allergic to that. Nor do I have any intention of attempting to copy anything that he’s done. But as much as I can, I’m trying to approach it as a new piece of work. Like the same way you would a new play. That’s a difficult thing to do right now, but it’ll become easier once I start rehearsal.

EW: There’s kind of connective tissue with this, though, isn’t there? The way Anna and Saela talk about being in your body…

PM: That’s very much Stanley. I don’t think he’s like a heady person, and I don’t think Brian’s a heady person. I think they’re in their body. They’re physical in their essence.

There’s almost a Stanley and Stella dynamic in God’s Creatures, but with a mother instead of a wife.

PM: Totally. Essence-wise, for sure.

He can be abusive, and she just kind of stands back and enables it even though she knows better.

PM: Yeah. But there’s also a bond.

Marshall Shaffer

Marshall Shaffer is a New York-based film journalist. His interviews, reviews, and other commentary on film also appear regularly in Slashfilm, Decider, and Little White Lies.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.