The Irresistible Intimacy of <em>Normal People</em>

Normal People is different. Rooney’s Marxist politics are sometimes critiqued for being glibly dropped into conversations between relatively privileged characters, and yet these arguments miss how love, in her works, is its own kind of capital, given and taken as needs require. That doesn’t mean it exists in a vacuum. “Certainly something that I’m trying to accomplish in my work, in my two novels and in the show and the novel I’m writing now, is to try and situate love and romance in all its overwhelming power—and all the pleasure and desire that comes with that—in the difficult complexity of ordinary life,” Rooney said. “To take the mundane, unglamorous difficulty that we all have just being alive, and to allow romance to infiltrate that, and not be dishonest to either aspect.” Normal People isn’t the stuff of pure fantasy, even though the emotional generosity it imagines, the redemptive connection between two people, feels rare enough in a contemporary work of art to qualify it as such.

Rooney is often compared to Jane Austen for the ways in which her work depicts human relationships being influenced by the socioeconomic realities in which they play out. Inequality exists; so do arbitrary hierarchical frameworks that complicate emotion. At the beginning of Normal People, set in 2011, Marianne and Connell are in their final year of high school in a small town in Ireland. Marianne’s father is dead, her mother is wealthy but pathologically cold, and her older brother is abusive. Connell’s mother, who had him as a teenager, is poor but kind and extremely loving; she works for Marianne’s mother as a cleaner. At school, Connell is well liked while Marianne is awkward, odd, and ostracized. Both are mocked for not behaving in ways that conform to gender stereotypes: Connell’s “excruciating attempts at tenderness” with his previous girlfriends are relayed around school, while Marianne’s strangeness, the rumors that she doesn’t shave her legs, make her “an object of disgust.”

Read: The small rebellions of Sally Rooney’s ‘Normal People’

In the TV series, whose first six episodes are directed by the Oscar-nominated Lenny Abrahamson (Room), the connection between Marianne (played by Daisy Edgar-Jones) and Connell (Paul Mescal) is both innate and negotiated. Abrahamson often films the characters from behind to show the viewer their perspective; he zooms all the way in to their faces so that their eyes and mouths dominate the screen, making the people watching complicit in the heightened sense of intimacy. The duo are instinctively drawn to each other, but their differences in status get in the way. “It’d be awkward in school if something happened with us,” Connell tells Marianne one day at her house, even as they inch closer and closer to each other. Marianne looks down, then takes a step toward him and holds his gaze. “No one would have to know,” she says.

In losing Rooney’s internal monologues for each character, the show rests on the chemistry between the two actors, and their ability to convey wordlessly what each character is thinking. On-screen, Edgar-Jones and Mescal generate so much intensity that any scene without the two of them almost feels like an affront. After reading the book and preparing scenes for her audition, Edgar-Jones told me, “it really wasn’t until I met Paul and we did that chemistry read that I really understood their relationship, because that’s so key, the way they ping off each other.” Mescal was cast first; when Edgar-Jones came to read, he told me, “it just felt like we weren’t saying the lines; we were communicating what the scene was. And I could tell by the response from the room that it wasn’t about an audition anymore.”