Though fans will hope and trust that a TV adaptation of Sally Rooney’s Normal People would not shy from the novel’s sexual intimacies, it keeps us waiting a while – it is not until the second episode that undercover teenage lovers Connell and Marianne get under the covers for the first time. For a few seconds, it all seems to be going comically wrong, as her arms and her ponytail flail above her head, trapped in her pull-off bra. But then her face emerges, shiny with trust and desire, and the fireworks begin. “I love that scene,” says Daisy Edgar-Jones. “It’s so awkward. For me, it is the most representative love scene I’ve ever seen. Connell is so kind and giving and safe with her that it’s a very healthy depiction of what first-time sex can look like.”

This might make it sound a bit PG, but as her co-star Paul Mescal quickly chips in: “It’s not clinical. It’s loving and romantic and sexy because you see two minds coming together.” To describe the adaptation as hotly anticipated is an understatement. Rooney herself has co-scripted six of the episodes in collaboration with award-winning playwright and story editor on series two of HBO’s Succession Alice Birch, who recalls “hoovering up” the novel in a jetlagged blur and immediately emailing her agent to say she was desperate to adapt it. “I felt very emotional about those two people. I don’t often have this feeling. In our industry, we can be quite quick to enjoy a book and then immediately think about how to hack it to bits for the screen.”

Birch is in good company. Practically as soon as Rooney hit the literary world with her debut novel Conversations With Friends in 2017, she became a calling card for anyone who aspired to be seen as culturally attuned. Her novels were Instagrammed alongside chai lattes atop piles of on-trend books. She was name-dropped on Twitter by actors Lena Dunham and Sarah Jessica Parker, was featured in Florence + the Machine’s fan book club, and was ranked high in books of the year charts by British Vogue and O, The Oprah Magazine. But she was also recognised as a writer’s writer. “It is a long time since I cared so much about two characters on a page,” wrote author Anne Enright in the Irish Times, when Normal People was published a year later.

Novelist and playwright Sebastian Barry, who took over from Enright as laureate for Irish fiction, says: “There is a uniqueness in Sally Rooney, not only in her absolutely crystal clear style, but also in her universal success. It is difficult to identify a comparable moment in Irish writing, both in its breadth and its immediacy, unless you can go back to the impact that the novel, and more particularly the film, of Roddy Doyle’s The Commitments had in the early 1990s. There are other equally radiant careers, more conventionally spread over decades, like Anne Enright’s, or Colm Tóibín’s, but the suddenness of Sally Rooney, the almost abrupt arrival, reminds me more of a figure like Martin McDonagh in the theatre. There is a time before Sally Rooney and a time after.”

The sales figures are huge for a literary novel, with Normal People running through seven editions, selling nearly 500,000 copies in the UK and 76,000 in Ireland, according to industry analysts Nielsen Bookscan. Translation rights have been sold into 41 languages. No pressure, then, on Edgar-Jones and Mescal, who are well aware that they are playing two of the most coveted TV roles in the world for their peers right now.

Marianne and Connell are a couple striving to find each other through a fog of class, social status and their own failures to communicate. Connell’s mother cleans Marianne’s house. At their secondary school in Sligo, he is a popular sporting hero, while she is the scratchy school swot. Their attraction is as much intellectual as it is sexual, as they learn when they rediscover each other at university in Dublin, by which time their status has reversed: in this rarefied new ambience, she is the cool beauty, while he is the bristly outsider.

The series marks the screen debut of Mescal, the 24-year-old son of a garda and a schoolteacher from County Kildare, who made his first professional appearance as an earlier charismatic outsider, Jay Gatsby, at Dublin’s Gate theatre. He was appearing at another Dublin theatre, the Abbey, when he heard Normal People was being cast. “It’s one of those parts that you know quickly will be big. I was around a lot of Irish actors at the time and we all felt we were Connell, in a sense,” he says.

Edgar-Jones, a 21-year-old Londoner whose mother is from Northern Ireland, is a relative TV veteran, who made her debut at 17 in the revival of the vintage comedy Cold Feet. She overheard a friend auditioning for the part at her kitchen table. “And I thought: ‘Hmm, that sounds good.’ Then I got the book and I just fell in love with it. The stakes were really high because I thought: ‘Oh my God, I love this more than I’ve loved anything. I really want this part.’”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Paul Mescal as Connell and Daisy Edgar-Jones as Marianne in Normal People. Photograph: Enda Bowe

For all that they seem a natural on-screen match, the casting process was as technical in its way as a stud farm vetting, involving “chemistry reads” both together and separately to find out whether the onscreen magnetism worked. Mescal was first to be cast, emerging from a big pool of actors over several rounds of auditions. Edgar-Jones got down to the last five on the strength of a “self-tape” that she had hurriedly recorded in a lunch break from another show. They have clearly become good friends. “When Daisy walked into the room for the chemistry read, I immediately thought: ‘That’s who I imagined Marianne to look like,” says Mescal.

“I saw Paul and thought: ‘I know everything about you!’ Which is stupid, because he’s not Connell,” adds Edgar-Jones.

The fact that this instant recognition was the product of such a painstaking selection process seems entirely in keeping with the Rooney project: for all that her novels have been hailed as an emanation of the zeitgeist, they are also steeped in classic protocols. “Normal People has the engine of a 19th-century novel,” wrote Enright. “There is an encompassing sense of authority in the voice that makes it more terrible when the characters’ lives start to slip away from them… Rooney is completely in control.” There’s a streak of DH Lawrence in the interraction of hunky sports jock Connell and poor little rich girl Marianne, just as there’s a daub of Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook in their determination to find their own political and erotic space (though true to Rooney’s adversarial intelligence as a former debating champion, it’s Connell who precociously name-drops the novel, rather than Marianne).

The drama unfolds over four years – sweeping the lovers from school through university to the brink of their adult lives. One might have expected it to be adapted into a lush feature film, but instead it arrives in 12 half-hour TV episodes. The Oscar-nominated Irish film-maker Lenny Abrahamson, who co-directs the series, continues the story. “It used to be that only sitcoms were half an hour and if you wanted to tell a dramatic story, it had to be an hour. But we really liked the idea of short episodes, because it allows you to be single-focused,” he explains, citing that first climactic sex scene: “You couldn’t have had that density of focus over an hour.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Daisy Edgar-Jones as Marianne. Photograph: Enda Bowe

“When I hear the phrase ‘sex scene’, I think about a dialogue scene,” Rooney told one interviewer. “What do these characters want to say to each other? I won’t just write a scene where two characters say words to each other randomly. Similarly, sex scenes have to actually play some dramatic role.” Irish Times columnist and author Fintan O’Toole picks up her point, saying: “Actually she reminds me of Chekhov in the acute, subtle and nonjudgmental way she calibrates human desires and foibles and self-delusions. She’s not solipsistic – big things are going on underneath the intimacies: social class, money, gender, power. I think she’s hit a nerve right now because we’re in a moment when there’s a heightened awareness that desire and sex cannot be extricated from all of these things. She’s creating love stories for a post-romantic age.”

But the representation of those love stories is inevitably different in a novel, which deals in words, and on film, where articulacy lies in the manipulation of the human body. “The sex was a big challenge and we took it really seriously from the beginning,” says Abrahamson. “What we would aim to show, but also literally how we would do the sex in a way that was positive, safe and healthy for everyone involved both in front of and behind the camera.”

Not least of the challenges was the issue of asymmetry – of both gender and status – which has cast such a shadow over the media world in the era of #MeToo. The theatre, film and TV director Hettie Macdonald is responsible for six of the episodes. “I wanted to make it a more gender-balanced crew right from the start,” says Abrahamson. “It’s often the case that crews are very male-dominated, especially in the camera department, and I’m beginning to see that there’s less and less reason for that.”

“But here’s the biggest thing for me,”he adds. “I’m in my 50s and as far as the young actors are concerned, I’m successful. My worry would be – because I’m squeamish about ever doing anything uncomfortable for them – that they would feel under pressure to do what I wanted, and my fear of that would stop me from asking.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Behind the scenes on the shoot, with Lenny Abrahamson second from left and cinematographer Suzie Lavelle second from right. Photograph: BBC

The breakthrough was the decision to hire the services of “intimacy co-ordinator” Ita O’Brien. “I was anxious to start with because I thought the most subtle and important moments would be between me and the actors,” admits Abrahamson. “But what’s brilliant is that she would come in and talk to the whole crew and production about simple things like not using euphemisms, about getting explicit consent every time you’re about to do something and finding a language to talk about lovemaking, and the shapes and moods of it, that is empowering for the people involved.”

“She’s the go-to,” agrees Mescal. “She’s brilliant,” says Edgar-Jones. “The sex scenes were a joy to us because it was her job to worry about how it would work and we just turned up, did the choreography and carried on. We just had to think about the emotional beats.”

For Edgar-Jones, this sensitivity extends importantly to the use of nudity. “What I’m really happy with is that there’s an equal representation of both our bodies. Paul is equally exposed. When we’re in a scene and topless, it’s different for Paul than it is for me, so that it’s nice that there are shots where we are both fully nude! It means that there’s more of a balance, gender-wise.” One of the puzzling features of the intense identification of readers with Connell and Marianne is that they inhabit a pretty rarefied cultural niche, with its own intellectual and political snobberies. They discuss critical theory and The Communist Manifesto and despise fellow students who don’t put in the reading. At school, Marianne turns her loneliness into an arrogant aloofness which is part of her appeal to Connell, making more popular girls seem dull and samey. Rooney herself has said she had expected the novels only to appeal to “people who share my ideology or have a similarly jaundiced view of social systems.”

How does this aspect of the story connect with its young stars? “I definitely related to Marianne at school in some ways, particularly the perception she thinks other people have of her, and playing with whether she can change that,” says Edgar-Jones. “I went to a very small school [the independent Mount school for girls in north London]. You grow so much as a person from 11 to 16, and by the end I felt I was fundamentally different to who I was when I began, but my friends only ever saw how I was when I was 11. When I did my first course at the National Youth Theatre at 15, suddenly, there were loads of people who were passionate about the same things, so I was able to colour in the shape I had grown into.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘When I hear the phrase “sex scene”, I think about a dialogue scene’: Sally Rooney. Photograph: David Buchan/Variety/Rex/Shutterstock

Mescal, like Connell in the film, was an academically bright Gaelic football star, who decided to veer off in an unexpected direction – in his case by taking himself off to the Lir Academy, a drama school attached to Trinity College Dublin. “That stepping out can make you feel quite naked for a while. I had no prior conception of what drama school, or a life in acting, was going to look like,” he says. The university social scene is treated with a particular disdain by Rooney as a place of privileged poseurs. “I was off-campus on the Conservatoire side of training, but when you venture on campus and you go to house parties, you definitely feel that degree of performance that we see at those house parties in the book. The social class performance… Sally really captures that,” says Mescal.

But in one respect the characters are quite separate from their generation. “It is funny because this has been called a millennial novel but they don’t meet over a dating app,” points out Edgar-Jones. “They meet in real life and they have real conversations. They don’t do that much texting, they talk. That’s healthy and exciting and important to show that it does still happen. We’re not all chatting over Facebook Messenger, we do still have intimate, face-to-face relationships.”

Rooney herself has said she’s more involved with social media than Connell and Marianne, though she abandoned her pugnacious Twitter account in 2019 with a parting line that would do Marianne proud: “just for clarity, I continue to agree with all your good opinions and disagree with your bad ones (of which I’m sad to say there are many)”.

Mescal admits: “My experience of myself and my peers is that Connell and Marianne are in the minority. I do think intimacy and intimate relationships are more difficult in general because of social media and dating apps. I find that slightly depressing and scary because you’re constantly aware of presenting yourself, and then your human contact with people becomes very different. I think Connell and Marianne are exemplary examples of not doing that. We shouldn’t forget that sometimes the best place to meet somebody is at a bar rather than over a phone.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Paul Mescal as Connell, who plays Gaelic football. Photograph: BBC/Element/Enda Bowe/PA Media

Which brings us to the question of anxiety, to which both lovers are prone. “I do feel like anxiety is more prevalent among young people,” admits Edgar-Jones. “I feel more pressure to be living a life according to what I’m exposed to, what I see on social media – a perfect, positive life. I sometimes feel stressed when I see all my friends hanging out, for example if I’m self-employed and at home with nothing to do. But in a positive way, I’m really grateful to social media and what it’s done to exposing us to different ways of life and different views, allowing us to have bigger dialogues.”

Mescal adds: “I think there’s a greater financial pressure on people our age. There’s a likelihood that we will be renting for the vast majority, if not all, of our life. That’s just a shift in society that does lend itself a kind of… what’s it called? A durability. As millennials, we have built up a durability to just take what comes and make the best of it. We’ve known no different in that sense.”

The interview is taking place in London, where both actors are now based, just as social distancing is coming into force. How do they think their generation are going to cope? “I think we are well-equipped – as well as one can be – to deal with something like coronavirus because we are constantly used to adapting and compensating and compromising,” says Mescal. “If anything positive has come out of it for me, looking at everyone back home in Ireland, there’s the opportunity for a strong sense of global community and reflecting on everything that’s difficult together. That’s quite uplifting, because we can become quite isolated and alienated and disenfranchised within our own communities.”

One thing that is going to bring many people together is the 12 episodes of Normal People, though such is the devotion to Rooney’s characters that appraisal is likely to devolve to the level of: “Why does Marianne have a fringe?” The actors agree. “We’re not going to fit everybody’s idea of them. The only thing that we do have control over is emotionally interrogating them as you would any other character. But we do love Connell and Marianne.”

The full series of Normal People is available on BBC Three from 26 April. The US Hulu release is on 29 April