Saturday night and The Old Queen’s Head in Islington is heaving with beautiful women. I have to shout over the blasting R&B in order to be heard. And I need to be heard, because I’m here to find out, once and for all, if the rumours are true.
I am here on my first assignment for this very magazine. I had never considered myself an investigative reporter before, until now. Last week, the call came in. Rumours have, for the last few months, been swirling around the aforementioned pub. Rumours of a scandalous kind. Sex Rumors. Celebrity sex rumours, to be precise.
Word on the street is, practically every twenty-something woman in London has a friend of a friend who has had sex with Paul Mescal.
In case you hadn’t heard, the Irish actor and heartthrob of Normal People fame established himself as an Old Queen’s Head regular while performing in A Streetcar Named Desire at the Almeida Theatre earlier this year. The conveniently located pub-cum-nightclub became Mescal’s local jaunt, and word started to spread. Presumably exhausted from hours of Stanley Kowalskiing for the general public, Mescal would come to the pub to unleash whatever was left of his innate, Brando-esque magnetism. His goal? To let loose and get loose with some of the lucky ladies of Islington. And, from what I hear, the ladies of Islington have been flocking to meet him.
But the Mescal sex-lore is far more specific than simply the actor’s vaunted status as a top shagger. Multiple sources have also claimed that, after his amorous liaisons, Mescal is in the habit of taking women on a walk in the park and suddenly distracting them so that he can run away without any consequences.
We’ve all been victims of a smash and dash before, but doing a literal runner? Maybe it’s to avoid attention from the paparazzi. Maybe Mescal just loves parading around in those little running shorts. Maybe he’s got deep-rooted, unresolved communication issues. There could be any number of reasons why anyone would pelt away from their conquests post-haste the morning after.
But speculation alone does not satisfy our voracious appetites to understand the myth of London’s leading lothario. So, armed with a pen and pencil, a double rum and coke, and some entirely fake bravado, I set out to uncover whether what the Rooney mill has been churning out is true.
Arriving at the OQH at 8pm on a Saturday night, I was unprepared for the queue that was steadily forming at the pub’s entrance. It might be a popular watering-hole of its own accord, but the Mescal Effect had obviously increased its notoriety. I wanted to know how often the Irish actor swings through for conquest. I thought the staffers would be the best place to start my search.
