Paul Mescal once freaked out at fan for touching his butt inappropriately

Some people just can’t keep their hands to themselves.

While joining The History of Sound costar Josh O’Connor in Entertainment Weekly’s video segment “Lie vs. Lie,” Paul Mescal told a story of an encounter with an inappropriate fan in response to the prompt to share a fan interaction that stuck with him.

Mescal remembered an incident that happened while he was greeting fans at the stage door in London following a performance of A Streetcar Named Desire. “This woman who’s probably in her 50s, I’m taking a photo with her and her daughter,” Mescal explained. “She’s a fan. She says, ‘I loved Normal People, and I saw the play tonight.'”

Mescal then proceeded to ask O’Connor for permission to put his hands on him to demonstrate the encounter.

“She puts her hands on the small of my back initially,” he continued. “I’m standing there, and I kinda freeze, and it slides down to my bum. And I step away and I’m like, That was surely a mistake.”

“So, I step back in and I’m like, ‘Ooh, that was weird,'” Mescal went on. “She puts her hand on my bum again, and I lose it. I was just like, ‘What are you doing?’ Her daughter was standing right there. I freak out.”

Mescal said after that, he got so angry that he went back inside the theater and ended his stage door greetings for the night.

That icky moment was indeed a truth from Mescal, which O’Connor easily divined. But the two took turns trading stories and then had to determine if they were falsehoods. O’Connor shared a delightful tale (and rather obvious lie) about how he was rejected for Mescal’s role in Gladiator II because he was “too big” after bulking up for his part in Challengers.

Mescal and O’Connor star in The History of Sound, out Friday, a romantic drama about two men, Lionel (Mescal) and David (O’Connor), who meet while attending the Boston Conservatory to study music and further their bond while on a trip collecting folk songs in rural Maine following World War I.

The film, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May, has earned comparisons to gay romance Brokeback Mountain. But Mescal has dismissed such parallels as “lazy.”

“I personally don’t see the parallels at all with Brokeback Mountain, other than we spent a little time in a tent,” Mescal said in video footage of a press conference. “[Brokeback] is a beautiful film, but it is dealing with the idea of repression, and this film is fundamentally pointed in the opposite direction.”

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“So, to be honest, I find those comparisons relatively lazy and frustrating,” he continued, “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 two men’s love and not a film about their repressed relationship with their sexuality.”

Watch the video above for more.