Paul Mescal has opened up about his practically confirmed split with Phoebe Bridgers, revealing all the chatter about his personal life can sometimes leave him “mad and upset”.
The Normal People star spoke to Vanity Fair in an interview published on Tuesday where he said he struggles with having to stay silent in the face of rumours about his life because he just wants to clear that shit immediately.
“Sometimes I can drown it out and then other times it makes me really mad and upset,” he said.
“People are going to write and say things because there’s a certain interest with any person who’s in the public eye in how that person lives their life, and who they’re living up with, and what they’re doing and how they’re going about doing it. And look, a lot of the time people are really kind about their support for me. That’s my predominant experience.”
The interviewer then asked Mescal directly about the speculation regarding his relationship, to which he said he plans to keep that stuff as private as possible.
“I definitely feel the temptation to say the status of my whatever—that will always be there,” he said, noticeably avoiding the word “relationship”.
“But I don’t think that’s a wise thing to do.
“When Normal People came out, I was very forthright in interviews, and it didn’t actually serve me.
“But the temptation still exists to be like, ‘Shut the fuck up. This is my life. This is what’s going on. Or this is what’s not going on.’
“But moving forward as much as I can, that’s going to be my life that is private. That’s a difficult thing to achieve. But giving strangers an answer about my life doesn’t actually help me. It’s like a quick boost of serotonin, being like, ‘I’ve said what I need to say.’ And then it’s just Twitter fodder.”
ICYMI, Paul Mescal and Phoebe Bridgers began dating in 2020, quickly becoming the internet’s fave indie couple. Two years later they got engaged, winning the hearts of 20-something year old sad bisexuals everywhere, but just when it was all looking up, rumours began to swirl that the two had called it quits.
In December that year, speculation amped up that Mescal had broken up with Bridgers over claims she was “canoodling” with Bo Burnham, which wasn’t helped by pictures surfacing of the two travelling together sans Mescal.
https://twitter.com/candidevent/status/1614057299718590465?s=20&t=dUlYral5K0HE7O0jXRBdvg
Later that same month, Bridgers’ collab with SZA came out in which she sang about having a big fight in New York’s Ludlow Hotel. But this could be about anyone, you wonder. Yes, but she also told NME that the turnaround for the song was “really fast”, meaning she likely began working on it after the break up rumours.
Aaaaand then Vogue Australia published an interview with Bridgers in February this year that really opened the floodgates. According to TikTok, the article referred to Pascal as Bridgers’ “former fiancé” for a hot second before it was allegedly edited out.
Now, we haven’t seen this ourselves and can’t confirm it, but there’s no shortage of screenshots and speculation online of the damning words.
Vogue Australia hasn’t confirmed or denied if it edited out the phrase “former fiancé”, and Bridgers and Mescal are yet to actually clear up what happened between them.
For Mescal, it looks like he never will.
