Paul Mescal hits out at ‘lazy and frustrating’ comparisons between new movie and Brokeback Mountain

‘The History of Sound’ stars Mescal opposite Josh O’Connor as two young music students who travel to rural Maine together in the summer of 1919 to record local folk songs

Paul Mescal does not agree with the critics who compared his new gay romance film to Brokeback Mountain.

The History of Sound, directed by Oliver Hermanus, stars Mescal, 29, and Josh O’Connor, 35, as two young music students who travel to rural Maine together in the summer of 1919 to record local folk songs.

The film premiered at Cannes Film Festival on Wednesday to mixed reviews. Several critics compared the movie to Ang Lee’s 2005 modern classic about two cowboys (played by Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger) grappling with their sexuality.

“I personally don’t see the parallels at all with Brokeback Mountain, other than we spent a little time in a tent,” Mescal said at a Cannes press conference on Thursday, reportedly drawing laughs from the room.

“[Brokeback] is a beautiful film but it is dealing with the idea of repression… I find those comparisons relatively lazy and frustrating, but for the most part I think the relationship I have to the film is born out of the fact that it’s a celebration between these men’s love and not the repression of their sexuality.”

Alongside Mescal and O’Connor, the film stars Chris Cooper, Molly Price, Raphael Sbarge, Hadley Robinson, Emma Canning, Briana Middleton, and Gary Raymond.

Paul Mescal was at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival for the premiere of ‘The History of Sound’ (Getty Images)

In her two-star review for The Independent, Sophie Monks Kaufman called The History of Sound “severely anticlimactic.”

“The History of Sound, which has just premiered at Cannes, is not a continuous relationship drama but about a brief encounter that colours a life, and it is not characterised by the powers of its leading men – who have both delivered stronger performances in better films,” she wrote. “It is another slight, sentimental film by the man who made the Bill Nighty vehicle Living.”

Elsewhere at the Cannes press conference, Mescal was asked whether he thinks cinema is “moving away” from alpha male roles. The Irish actor famously starred in Ridley Scott’s Gladiator II last year as Lucius, son of Russell Crowe’s Maximus.

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“It’s ever shifting,” he said, according to Variety. “I think maybe in cinema we’re moving away from the traditional, alpha, leading male characters. I don’t think the film is defining or attempting to redefine masculinity, I think it is being very subjective to the relationship between [their characters] Lionel and David.”