Normal People star Paul Mescal has revealed how warnings to his elderly Irish relatives about intimate sex scenes on the show hilariously backfired.
The 24-year-old actor said older members of his family tried to avoid the lovemaking scenes – but they were so long that when they came back into the room he and co-star Daisy Edgar-Jones were still hard at it.
The Co Kildare actor told the Graham Norton Show: “My granny warned my great aunt that there were a lot of sexy bits and that when she felt those were about to happen she should go off and do something else.
“In episode two when we started kissing she took the dog out.
“But she underestimated the time it would take and as she came back in we were right in the throes of it all.
“I suggested that a good long chore or a couple of cups of tea would do the trick next time!”
That scene, in which Daisy’s schoolgirl character Marianne loses her virginity to Paul's Connell, lasts a full nine minutes of the half hour programme.
The story had host Graham in stitches as he welcomed both stars to the BBC One chat show via webcam.
Normal People has been a phenomenal success all over the world since the first episodes of the 12-part drama were broadcast at the end of last month.
The series has turned Paul and Londoner Daisy into household names even though both are stuck in their respective London flats during lockdown.
Even Connell’s neck chain, worn throughout the series, has its own fan page on Instagram.
Asked by Graham what they thought of the astonishing success of the show, as it reaches the 30 million viewer mark in the UK, Daisy said: “It’s hard to believe people like it when we’re sitting in our bedrooms. It’s surreal.”
Paul added: “That’s not even a number I can compute. It sounds really good and brilliant but it’s not something either of us anticipated.
“It’s just been good news after good news. It’s crazy!”
RTE has been thrilled with the response to Normal People which follows the complicated love affair between smart but shy working class lad Connell and rich, vulnerable loner Marianne over several years, from school to Trinity College.
Downloads on the RTE Player have reached record levels with over 1.1 million streams adding to the 420,000 watching it on RTE One.
In the UK the series, directed by Oscar-nominated Room director Lenny Abrahamson and Hettie Macdonald, pulled in a record 16.2 million downloads in the first week which far outpaced the previous BBC Three peak on its iPlayer of 10.8 million for the first series of Killing Eve.
The intimate series has also attracted criticism for its explicit sex scenes with some outraged viewers ringing Joe Duffy’s Liveline to complain about the “pornography” and “fornication.”
The stars, who few people had heard of a month ago, appeared on The Graham Norton Show with Hollywood A-Listers Will Ferrell and Mark Ruffalo, British funny woman Miranda Hart and singer Billy Porter.
Ferrell was promoting his new Netflix film Eurovision while three-time Oscar-nominated Ruffalo revealed how he played twins in I Know This Much is True.
He revealed how he lost 20lbs to play one brother and then put on 30lbs to play the other.
“It was insane and I don’t know that I would do it again because it was such a massive undertaking. I went completely grey in the year I was working on it,” he told Graham.
“I gained and lost weight. I could have put on 30lbs, but because I am 53 trying to lose it again would probably take me the rest of my life!
“Instead, I lost 20lbs to play one brother and then, when that was finished, I put on 30lbs.
“I went in both directions so there was a greater disparity and it was more healthy for me.”
Revealing that he wasn’t acting into a void, he said: “We stayed away from greenscreen to make it as homemade as possible but sometimes we had to put my face on another actor that played both parts across from me.
“Sadly, he gave the performance of a lifetime that you will never see!”
