Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor will find love in a WWI-era romance

The rum­bling you may have heard ear­li­er today was just the col­lec­tive reac­tion to a par­tic­u­lar­ly buzzy bit of cast­ing news per­tain­ing to two of the UK’s most wide­ly pined-after heart­throbs, pool­ing their dreami­ness in a joint project for the first time. Any con­fu­sion about why fans of Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor have been gasp­ing for air over the past few hours — that will be why.

The actors have signed on to costar in the upcom­ing film The His­to­ry of Sound, an adap­ta­tion of Ben Shattuck’s award-win­ning short sto­ry of the same name. To fur­ther sweet­en the deal, they’ll be direct­ed by Oliv­er Her­manus, the South African film­mak­er last seen at the helm of the Angolan apartheid pic­ture Moffie and cur­rent­ly hard at work on his Ikiru qua­si-remake Liv­ing.

The His­to­ry of Sound fol­lows Lionel (Mescal) and David (O’Connor), a pair of young men who set out across Amer­i­ca cir­ca World War I on an anthro­po­log­i­cal mis­sion, of sorts: they decide to cre­ate a record of the ​“lives, voic­es, and music of their coun­try­men,” as the Vari­ety item break­ing the news put it. While they roam the coun­try­side and the glob­al con­flict rages else­where, the men find a ten­der love with one anoth­er, bound to cul­mi­nate in a hushed and ten­der sex scene sure to make many a teenage girl’s brain instan­ta­neous­ly liquefy.

While the pedi­gree of the tal­ent involved can­not be denied, it’s a bit odd that a team with such dis­tinct roots in the UK would be tapped for a project so ori­ent­ed around Amer­i­cana. We’ve yet to even hear Mescal’s Amer­i­can accent, and fans of Her­manus will won­der how he’ll take to the trans­plant as well.

First, he’ll have to com­plete pro­duc­tion on Liv­ing, with prin­ci­pal pho­tog­ra­phy not com­menc­ing until sum­mer of 2022. (The Vari­ety item men­tions that Her­manus will shoot loca­tions in the UK and Italy as well, sug­gest­ing that the war may not be so far from the idyll enjoyed by the two men after all.) But when it does, it’ll undoubt­ed­ly be the most spied-upon set since Tim­o­th­ée Cha­la­met donned Young Wonka’s top hat.