The Actor Roundtable: Daniel Craig, Paul Mescal and Colman Domingo on Impostor Syndrome and the Dark Roles Women Love

 

Adrien Brody, Sebastian Stan and Peter Sarsgaard reconcile over the pressures of delivering a standout performance: "I had a panic attack every night."

Former James Bond Daniel Craig, The Pianist Oscar winner Adrien Brody, Euphoria Emmy winner Colman Domingo, Marvel superhero turned Emmy nominee Sebastian Stan, masterly storyteller actor Peter Sarsgaard and Oscar-nominated heartthrob Paul Mescal range in age from 28 (Mescal) to 56 (Craig); hail from around the world (America, England, Ireland and Romania); and forged very different paths to stardom.

 But they all share one particular trait in common: Each gave a standout performance in a 2024 film — or, in Stan’s case, two — that led to them congregating in mid-November at Soho House West Hollywood for THR‘s annual Actor Roundtable.

Their characters are unforgettable: a Jewish architect who survives the Holocaust and comes to America (Brody in The Brutalist); a gay American addict in 1950s Mexico (Craig in Queer); an incarceree who finds redemption in art (Domingo in Sing Sing); an angry young man set on destroying the city that deceived him (Mescal in Gladiator II); a TV exec who oversees live coverage of a terrorist attack at the 1972 Munich Olympics (Sarsgaard in September 5); a disfigured actor who undergoes facial reconstructive surgery (Stan in A Different Man); and a striving young Donald Trump (Stan in The Apprentice). So, too, was their conversational exchange.

Let’s talk about how these projects came to you. Daniel, after your Bond chapter — five films over 15 years — how did you finish up hearing from Luca Guadagnino, whom you’d met before any of that?

DANIEL CRAIG I had no plan whatsoever. I was like, “Maybe I’ll never work again.” But there’s a movie I did quite a few years ago called Love Is the Devil, which Luca is a big fan of. 

I play the reverse role in that movie [the younger man in a gay relationship rather than the older one, as in Queer]. But each of us gets old! Luca wanted to adapt Queer for many years. The rights finally came free not that long ago, and he approached me. I’d have swept the floor for the guy primarily because I think all his movies are exceptional and individual.

COLMAN DOMINGO My director, Greg Kwedar, and his co-writer, Clint Bentley, have been working as volunteer teachers at Sing Sing for years. 

They kept saying, “If we can capture what we’ve learned from this Rehabilitation Through the Arts program, wouldn’t it be great to do a film about that?” Greg said he put the idea in your drawer and then pulled it out a couple of years later and wrote a quick treatment, and at the end, luckily enough, he wrote down, “Colman Domingo.”

CRAIG You weren’t even born, were you?

PAUL MESCAL I was 4. (Laughs.)

… Ridley begins planning to move forward toward a sequel and sees you in Normal People?

MESCAL My dad showed me Gladiator when I was 13 — I was obsessed with the battle sequences. But Aftersun and things just like that [indie movies], that’s my bread and butter in terms of what I’m drawn to as an actor.

 But if I was going to make a big film? And Sir Ridley Scott comes asking? Ridley organized a Zoom, which lasted half an hour — he spoke with me for 10 minutes about the arc of the story, 10 seconds about his dog and 10 minutes about Gaelic football, and then it was offered to me. (Laughs.) I was like, “I could go and look at the first film and see what Russell did so excellently.” 

But that felt like a mistake simply because that’s not my lane. If Ridley’s entry point to me was something like Normal People and Aftersun and All of Us Strangers, I was keen to, where possible, draw a performance style from those films and try to bring it to something bigger.

PETER SARSGAARD Believe it or not, it started at a concert. Sean Penn, who was in the first movie I ever did, Dead Man Walking, was there, and we hung out for most of the weekend.

 At the end he said, “There’s something coming your way, by the way.” I went, “Oh, great.” He produced this movie. So just before I met Tim, to be fair, I was already like, “Sean likes this guy.

” Then Tim started talking about all this real footage, and I saw Jim McKay, this sports announcer who handed over the terrible news [on Sept. 5, 1972] without making it about himself, and I thought, “That type of person and sincerity has really been lost.” 

I started thinking it was a particularly interesting idea to go back to the first time that a live camera ever covered a crisis situation. Then Tim showed me pictures of all the real [original newsroom] equipment that he had, and a lot of the shit worked — it wasn’t greenscreen on the monitors behind us; we were watching actual images from the Olympics and comparing them to the real Jim McKay. I’d say the lead is almost Jim McKay. We’re supporting him.