Josh O'Connor and Paul Mescal refused to make The History of Sound without each other.
The period romance drama follows the relationship between two men, Lionel and David, who meet at a music conservatory in 1917 and later embark on a research trip to collect folk songs.
The actors met on Zoom in 2020 after O'Connor watched Mescal's breakout performance in the TV show, Normal People, and they have been friends ever since.
The in-demand stars had been wanting to make The History of Sound for five years, but the production kept being pushed back because they were never available at the same time.
However, they insisted that director Oliver Hermanus wait for their schedules to align instead of finding replacements who had more availability.
"Paul and I were constantly unavailable, and we both refused to make it with anyone else," O'Connor told IndieWire. "So we would get a date in, and then we kick it down the road, and then someone else would get another job. So we kick it down the road."
In the end, O'Connor had to squeeze all of his scenes into a three-week gap between his promotional commitments for Challengers and La Chimera last year.
"So we shot all my stuff first in three weeks, and then I left Paul and Oliver to do it," he added. "The script was so good; it felt like one of those projects where you could lead with instinct, in the knowledge that I was playing opposite Paul, who's so gifted."
While the project itself "felt like a breeze", the British actor admitted that he still had "great difficulty" wrapping his mouth around the American accent, although he has done it successfully on-screen a few times.
"You do some gymnastics in your mouth to say the letter R," he shared. "It's drawn out, whereas the American accent is a relaxed R, and so it's difficult for me to move my mouth in the way that it's supposed to for an American accent. It takes me a long time to get it right."
The History of Sound will be released in U.K. cinemas on 23 January.
