Paul Mescal’s mammy is holding off on cancer treatment to attend the Oscars

Paul Mescal’s proud mammy Dearbhla wouldn’t miss her son’s Oscar debut for anything…and that includes cancer.

Dearbhla Mescal was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, cancer of the bone marrow, in July. She’s been undergoing treatment but is taking a breather to attend the Academy Awards on Sunday, March 12 with Paul, who’s a Best Actor nominee for his stellar performance in "Aftersun."

She spoke with Irish interviewer Ray D’Arcy last week about the whirlwind life has been since Paul, 27, hit the big time after the 2020 BBC-Hulu series "Normal People" made him a superstar. Her treatment requires a month of isolation, she said, which will start after she returns to Dublin from Los Angeles.

"So I had my stem cells harvested, which basically means you kind of go on a dialysis... so they kind of hit you with nuclear chemo and then they reintroduce your stem cells back and it’s a bit like rebooting your phone,” Dearbhla told D'Arcy.

"I’ll be kind of super-duper, hopefully. It’s not a curable cancer, it is a seriously researched cancer and it’s kind of like a disease.”

"There's always home... Dinner will be on the table, the fire will be on." ??
Dearbhla Mescal talks to Ray about always being there for her children through the ups and the downs. @RadioRayRTE pic.twitter.com/TZkLxJP2SQ

— RTÉ Radio 1 (@RTERadio1) March 2, 2023

Paul was back home for a few days last month to attend the Dublin Film Festival where he promoted his indie "God’s Creatures" with Emily Watson. He also went back to where it all started, Maynooth Post Primary School, where he first developed a love of acting. He spent an hour there talking to the students and no doubt inspiring them. 

It was back in 2012 that the acting bug first bit when Paul starred in a school production of "Phantom of the Opera."

“When he did the rehearsal, you just knew: this is our man…it wasn’t just his voice, it was his presence, really. He was the Phantom from the word go. He really played the character. He could sing, he could act; there was a confidence and enjoyment that you could hear,” the school’s deputy principal Philip Blythe recalled to The Irish Times.

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*This column first appeared in the March 8 edition of the weekly Irish Voice newspaper, sister publication to IrishCentral.