Not many good things came out of the pandemic, but Paul Mescal was one of them. Cast your mind back, if you can bear it, to April 2020: lockdown was a month-old concept, most of us were getting to grips with Zoom, and we were still nurturing hobbies and sourdough habits to stave off the lure of unchecked TV time.

Towards the end of the month, however, the BBC dumped all 12 episodes of Normal People on iPlayer. If it wasn’t the first binge-watching phenomenon of the pandemic era – that honour goes to Tiger King – it gave that stifled spring a rare flurry of youthful, hormonal pop excitement. And the young, sweet, sad-eyed Irishman in the lead had a lot to do with it.

Mescal wasn’t solely accountable for Normal People’s success, of course. It was based on Sally Rooney’s ubiquitous bestseller, after all, handled with care by top writing and directing talent, and blessed with the kind of lightning-in-a-bottle chemistry between Mescal and co-lead Daisy Edgar-Jones that can’t be strategised.

But it was the actor – and his character, the awkward-sexy, tender-tough jock Connell Waldron – who swiftly became the driving face of the show, launching any number of besotted online memes, hastily typed thinkpieces about the rise of softboi masculinity, and a global uptick in the sale of men’s silver-chain necklaces.

Confirming that the fixation wasn’t the internet’s alone, he won a best actor Bafta for Normal People, and was Emmy-nominated across the pond; confirming it wasn’t just a Gen Z thing, the Rolling Stones recruited him to star in a music video, released before the summer of 2020 was out. Somehow, everyone’s early lockdown crush had emerged as an all-purpose star; if he played his cards right, he’d be more than just a Covid-era icon.

Not quite four years later, Mescal is enjoying his third Bafta nomination – this time, for a second consecutive year, in the film division. Tonight, he goes up against the likes of Robert Downey Jr and Ryan Gosling in the best supporting actor category for his seductive but fragile turn as Harry, the ill-fated lover of Andrew Scott’s protagonist in Andrew Haigh’s exquisite queer grief drama All of Us Strangers.

His performance hinges on the same combination of laddish charm and aching inner melancholy that drew us into Normal People, but it’s markedly more scarred, grown-up work: as an actor, Mescal appears to have aged a decade in the interim.

If anything, he’s become the go-to actor for a certain strain of square-shouldered, young-but-weary, and distinctly masculine sadness – the kind of emotional frailty that Hollywood rarely demands of its leading men. Last year, he was both Oscar- and Bafta- nominated for Aftersun, a fine-boned, low-budget British indie that became an unexpected arthouse breakout, largely on the strength of his quietly shattering performance as a depressive single father wrestling with his responsibilities to his pre-teen daughter and his own failing mental health.

He lost the Oscar to a markedly more histrionic portrayal of faltering fatherhood by Brendan Fraser in The Whale, and the Bafta to Austin Butler’s flashy incarnation of Elvis Presley. That he got into the race at all with such a minimum of trophy-baiting tricks and tears is a testament to his unassuming, open-hearted magnetism as a performer.

As a physical presence, he’s a strange blend of brawny and delicate – he made even Stanley Kowalski, that most swaggering of theatrical brutes, somehow lither and nervier in last year’s bracing, Rebecca Frecknall-directed West End revival of A Streetcar Named Desire, though no less volatile for it. He won a best actor Olivier for that, besting relative veterans Tom Hollander and David Tennant; at just 28, Mescal is racing through career milestones in something like a hurry.

The term “beginner’s luck” might sound disparaging, but the most striking thing about Mescal’s career thus far is how short it is on the trial and error that is usually mandatory for young stars on the make.

Yet in a business increasingly alert to nepo-baby advantage, he has none: the son of a garda and a schoolteacher, he had a thoroughly ordinary upbringing in the Irish university town of Maynooth. He pursued Gaelic football before taking an interest in acting at secondary school, eventually auditioning for the Lir Academy drama school at Trinity College, Dublin, from which he graduated in 2017.

He skipped no rungs on the acting ladder, yet to look over his credits is to note a distinct lack of embarrassing dross and character-building bit parts. Normal People was his very first screen role, A Streetcar Named Desire his West End debut. Even his stage career began with prestigious Dublin theatre work: upon graduation, his first public performance was in the title role in The Great Gatsby at the Gate theatre.

Mescal’s big-screen strike rate has been equally remarkable: he’s been in just six films to date, beginning auspiciously in 2021 with a supporting role opposite Olivia Colman in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s0 stylish adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s The Lost Daughter. Aftersun followed in short order; it premiered at the same edition of the Cannes film festival as God’s Creatures, a solemn, stirring Irish tragedy in which he and Emily Watson acted up a storm as a warring mother and son.

Last year brought his first two misfires, but nobly ambitious ones. Carmen, a loose, dance-forward riff on the Bizet opera updated to Trump-era America, was directed by ballet superstar Benjamin Millepied, and required some fancy footwork from Mescal opposite In the Heights star Melissa Barrera. He’s no Baryshnikov, but emerged with his dignity intact, even as the increasingly muddled, kitsch musical flamed out.

Likewise, he and Saoirse Ronan weren’t to blame for the failure of Foe, a high-minded but conceptually unwieldy sci-fi romance that mainly left you hungry to see the two compatriots paired in a relationship drama with an actual pulse. You can see how both projects looked enticing on paper; at any rate, All of Us Strangers paid off so richly as to swiftly memory-hole those missteps.

Currently, Mescal is in an interesting in-between stage of stardom. He commands magazine covers, has a large, devoted fan army, and is trailed by paparazzi hungry for yet another viral snap of him chugging beers in thigh-climbing gym shorts. Yet his film work has been limited to the arthouse, and he hasn’t yet revisited the mass-market TV exposure of Normal People.

Later this year, he’ll finally enter the multiplex realm, and not with any makeweight blockbuster: he’s the lead in Gladiator 2, Ridley Scott’s long-awaited sequel to the 2000 sword-and-sandal smash that vaulted Russell Crowe from hunky character actor to ubiquitous, Oscar-winning Hollywood headliner. One wonders if it’ll have the same effect on Mescal, not an actor hitherto associated with roaring, red-blooded action; if it does, one hopes some measure of the vulnerability that has hitherto been his on-screen signature will remain.

His other forthcoming projects suggest it will. Among them are Chloe Zhao’s Hamnet, an adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s novel in which he’ll play William Shakespeare to Jessie Buckley’s grieving Anne Hathaway; a return to queer romance, opposite Josh O’Connor, in Oliver Hermanus’s The History of Sound; and Richard Linklater’s extravagant 20-year plan to film Stephen Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along in something like real time.

These are not the choices of an actor hungry for mainstream celebrity at all costs: in a recent interview, he admitted he’d be “profoundly depressed” if his career eventually impedes his ability to walk unobstructed in the street. Still, the star minted in a time of isolation will have to accept, at some level, that he’s now out in the world.