Normal People came out in 2020.
We are in 2025. But 5 years seem to have absolutely nothing on the breakout leads Paul Mescal, 29, and Daisy Edgar-Jones’, 27, electrifying but wholesomely mundane chemistry — both in the show and across the innumerable instances outside it. Long story short, fans are convinced he’s in love with her but she’s not and so it goes. But facts move in an entirely different direction what with Paul being consistently linked to singer Gracie Abrams, 25, since 2023, around the same time that Daisy started properly seeing photographer Ben Seed.
Speaking of Paul and Gracie, the latter just went Instagram official with her long speculated beau. A photo of them catching a break in the midst of the Glastonbury Festival made it to her loved up photo dump from the event. Several clips from the event doing the rounds of social media have revealed that Paul and Gracie were there with a big group of friends — including Daisy and boyfriend Ben.
Now while Gracie’s semi-hard launch of Paul on her IG, is a pretty intense move, it’s only cue for the OG normal people stans to go doubly hard on the Normal People reel-to-real theory. Back in July 2024, Daisy, speaking to Variety, called Paul one of her “lifetime best friends”, a narrative Paul, incidentally, has always reciprocated: “Paul is one of my lifetime best friends…We met when I was 20, and Paul was 22; I’m so excited to see where we’ll be at 32, 42, and what life will bring us”, she said.
The duo also attended the Met Gala together back in 2022 with an image of Paul proudly gazing at Daisy from the back having gone viral — and we’re talking weeks worth of memes level of virality. In an interview with WhoWhatWear later, Daisy focused on the “innocence” behind the picture, revealing it was Paul’s idea to attend the gala together, seeing as she was so nervous about it.
Back in May 2024 during the Fastnet Film Festival, Daisy also ‘admitted’ to have fallen in ‘love’ with Paul, though she was quick to clarify that it was only as friends, Speaking about Normal People she said, “So read the book (Normal People), fell in love with it, fell in love with Lenny’s work. Met Paul, fell in love with Paul — like you know, as a friend. I’m announcing it here”.
There’s also the very convincingly corroborated idea that the whimsical deer tattoo on Paul’s right forearm is actually an ode to Daisy. And this sounds crazy, but hear it out. During an interview with GQ, when asked about the tattoo, Paul revealed that it had “something to do with Normal People” but immediately clammed up. The writer then noted how in the book, Paul’s character describes Daisy’s, as a deer, making it the only literal explanation that fits. Want to hear more? Daisy, in one of her interviews, explained how in playing her character Marianne, she tried to channel which animal?…you guessed it, a deer.
Add to all of this the fact that Paul’s social media handles, before he deactivated them all, were basically a “shrine’ to either just Daisy or precious moments with her, and we have ourselves a very enticing rabbit hole to throw ourselves down.
So, do you buy into this propaganda?
