Paul Mescal is Marc LeclercNOT running away from these rumors.

The Gladiator actor is no stranger to internet gossip—from the viral pic with then-girlfriend Phoebe Bridgers and Normal People costar Daisy Edgar Jones to recent speculation that the 28-year-old has a one-night-stand ritual that ends with him running away after a stroll in the park.

As for those one-night stand rumors, which surfaced on TikTok over the holidays, they gave Paul and his siblings a good laugh.

“We were looking at the videos and we were pissing ourselves at it,” he told GQ in an interview published Oct. 15. “Categorically untrue. And we were laughing, laughing, laughing, laughing. And the one thing that upset me was that I was in the kitchen, I remember my mum looking at the videos and she was getting upset. Isn’t that devastating?”

“It’s funny to us—my brother, me, my sister—because we know that this is the way the internet works. It’s hilarious. If it was true, it’d be f--king bad, but as a rumor, it’s funny,” he continued. “If you’re a mother, her impulse is to come out and be like, ‘He wouldn’t do this.’”

And while Paul—who has seemingly been in a relationship with singer Gracie Abrams since August—can take a joke, having his life under scrutiny isn’t always the easiest, especially for those closest to him.

“I mean, the speculation has been kind of mad for the last x amount of years,” he noted. “I’m not comfortable inviting any access into that part of my life. How I am in my private life is so precious to me because I get very little of it, and it might be public interest, but it’s not public-obligated information.”

In fact, this wasn’t the first time the All of Us Strangers star shared that he was upset about the interest in his personal life.

"The stuff that hurts is the personal stuff," he told Harper’s Bazaar in August. "It's nobody else's business and should never be commented on because it's indecent. And it's unkind. Honest answer, it makes me angry…It's the entitlement to the information that people expect that just drives me f--king mad."

But despite countless paparazzi shots of him in his iconic short shorts, Paul shared insight into the strict boundaries he has set between his private life and what he chooses to share publicly.

“I’ve learned that there’s certain lines in the sand now for me that just are going to be impenetrable for the benefit of my own sanity, but also the benefit of my work,” he explained to GQ. “Because I think if you don’t have those boundaries up in terms of lines in the sand in regards to your private life, people know way too much about you and then they can’t invest in the imagined landscape of your character because they know what your favorite thing to eat for breakfast is.”

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