In Ridley Scott’s sequel, a new generation of warriors clashes in a savage Rome: “It’s pretty gnarly.”
Paul Mescal turns and looks out the window as he talks about playing a warrior fighting for his life in Ridley Scott’s long-awaited sequel to Gladiator. The light strikes the steep angles of his face, and for a moment it’s easy to picture him as a millennia-old marble bust. “My nose just is kind of Roman,” he says. “So it’s useful in this context. The nose that I absolutely hated when I was in secondary school—and used to get ribbed for—became very, very useful when Ridley needed somebody to be in Gladiator II.”
Mescal didn’t expect that his breakthrough role as the sensitive overachiever Connell Waldron in the romantic series Normal People would lead to him playing a ferocious sword-swinging hero in the follow-up to 2001’s best-picture winner. But the swoony adaptation of Sally Rooney’s bestseller is where Scott discovered him. “When I watch anything, I tend to be clocking who’s interesting,” the director says. “It’s just in my DNA. And so, watching a TV show that’s not really my kind of TV show almost four years ago, I said, ‘Who’s this guy?’” As the possibility of Gladiator II became more and more real, Scott arranged a Zoom with Mescal while the actor was performing A Streetcar Named Desire in London. “I met with him and he said, ‘Of course, I’d love to do it.’ And that was it,” Scott says. “We were away and running with the ball. He was a special find. He was absolutely perfect.”
It really did happen that fast, Mescal confirms. “We spoke for about 20 to 30 minutes,” he says. “I wanted to get a flavor from him about what the story was going to be about, so we spent about 15 minutes talking about that, and then we spent another 10 minutes talking about the sport that I played growing up—Gaelic football. Maybe that was something that helped with it, in that I’m used to being physical in my body.” They talked about possibly doing a camera test, but Scott decided he didn’t need it. “My memory of it is that probably two or three weeks later, the offer came in,” Mescal says.
Now, with Gladiator II heading to theaters on November 22, they’re ready to tell the rest of the world where the story picks up in the years after Russell Crowe’s Maximus gave his life, upending the leadership of the decadent and corrupt society. The central character portrayed by Mescal is Lucius, last seen as the young son of Lucilla, Connie Nielsen’s noblewoman from the original movie. Nielsen also returns in the sequel, playing one of the few true-life figures in the otherwise fictional Gladiator storyline, the daughter of the late emperor Marcus Aurelius. In the actual history, Lucilla was a firebrand revolutionary who despaired of the direction Rome took after her father’s demise.
As Gladiator II picks up her story, decades have passed and Lucius has come of age far away from his mother. While he was still a child, Lucilla sent him to the northern coast of Africa, to a region called Numidia that was (at that point) just outside the reach of the Roman Empire. He never fully understood why, and as he grew stronger, so did his resentment—even if his mother’s reasons had been pure. “There’s a lot of Sophie’s Choice going on here, where these are impossible situations that we are being forced to reckon with,” says Nielsen. “There is an authoritarian power that is parading as if it were still somehow the vestiges of a Republican government. Inside of this travesty are human beings who are caught in this gamesmanship and power. That is what I find always so interesting in Ridley’s stories. He’s really showing the effect of power on people and what happens in a place where power is unrestrained.”
Mescal saw meaning in the story beyond the thrill of men clashing swords, fighting wild animals, or staging deadly combat for the amusement of the masses. Asked what Gladiator II is really about, he says, “What human beings will do to survive, but also what human beings will do to win. We see that in the arena, but also in the political struggle that’s going on outside of my character’s storyline, where you see there’s other characters striving and pulling for power. Where’s the space for humanity? Where’s the space for love, familial connection? And ultimately, will those things overcome this kind of greed and power? Those things are oftentimes directly in conflict with each other.”
The actor speaks more affectionately about the Gladiator II script than Crowe ever did about the original screenplay for the first movie. Crowe has often claimed that he nearly quit the movie because he thought there were only about 26 useful pages in the script. Crowe has said he and Scott reworked the story during filming into the successful film that ultimately arrived onscreen. Asked if she remembered that from the first movie, Nielsen laughs and says: “I remember Russell feeling like that. I remember that he definitely had some thoughts and feelings.”
“Ridley’s process tends to be extremely collaborative,” she adds. “He is extremely open to suggestions and ideas, which is what makes him a dream director in that way. He hears you, he sees you, and I, for one, come up every morning with my list of ideas that I run by him. He will go, “Yes, interesting…okay.…no, that’s way too much.…yep.’ I know that I’ll get some things through. And then there are things where [he follows] his instinct about the movie that he’s wanting to make. That was the same on Gladiator I. That’s why someone like him could handle someone like Russell saying, ‘There are only 23 pages that are workable.’ Another director would say, ‘Well, fuck you too—and do it over there, please.’”
As Gladiator II begins, Mescal’s Lucius has a wife and child, and lives a relatively peaceful life with them until conquerors from his homeland begin to encroach. “He’s taken root in a seacoast town in Numidia. He’s a blue-eyed, fair-skinned man with red hair, and he couldn’t be more different from the inhabitants,” Scott says. “It’s one of the last surviving civilizations, as the Romans begin to descend in North Africa and take it all over.”
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In Ridley Scott’s sequel, a new generation of warriors clashes in a savage Rome: “It’s pretty gnarly.”
Paul Mescal turns and looks out the window as he talks about playing a warrior fighting for his life in Ridley Scott’s long-awaited sequel to Gladiator. The light strikes the steep angles of his face, and for a moment it’s easy to picture him as a millennia-old marble bust. “My nose just is kind of Roman,” he says. “So it’s useful in this context. The nose that I absolutely hated when I was in secondary school—and used to get ribbed for—became very, very useful when Ridley needed somebody to be in Gladiator II.”
Mescal didn’t expect that his breakthrough role as the sensitive overachiever Connell Waldron in the romantic series Normal People would lead to him playing a ferocious sword-swinging hero in the follow-up to 2001’s best-picture winner. But the swoony adaptation of Sally Rooney’s bestseller is where Scott discovered him. “When I watch anything, I tend to be clocking who’s interesting,” the director says. “It’s just in my DNA. And so, watching a TV show that’s not really my kind of TV show almost four years ago, I said, ‘Who’s this guy?’” As the possibility of Gladiator II became more and more real, Scott arranged a Zoom with Mescal while the actor was performing A Streetcar Named Desire in London. “I met with him and he said, ‘Of course, I’d love to do it.’ And that was it,” Scott says. “We were away and running with the ball. He was a special find. He was absolutely perfect.”
It really did happen that fast, Mescal confirms. “We spoke for about 20 to 30 minutes,” he says. “I wanted to get a flavor from him about what the story was going to be about, so we spent about 15 minutes talking about that, and then we spent another 10 minutes talking about the sport that I played growing up—Gaelic football. Maybe that was something that helped with it, in that I’m used to being physical in my body.” They talked about possibly doing a camera test, but Scott decided he didn’t need it. “My memory of it is that probably two or three weeks later, the offer came in,” Mescal says.
Now, with Gladiator II heading to theaters on November 22, they’re ready to tell the rest of the world where the story picks up in the years after Russell Crowe’s Maximus gave his life, upending the leadership of the decadent and corrupt society. The central character portrayed by Mescal is Lucius, last seen as the young son of Lucilla, Connie Nielsen’s noblewoman from the original movie. Nielsen also returns in the sequel, playing one of the few true-life figures in the otherwise fictional Gladiator storyline, the daughter of the late emperor Marcus Aurelius. In the actual history, Lucilla was a firebrand revolutionary who despaired of the direction Rome took after her father’s demise.
As Gladiator II picks up her story, decades have passed and Lucius has come of age far away from his mother. While he was still a child, Lucilla sent him to the northern coast of Africa, to a region called Numidia that was (at that point) just outside the reach of the Roman Empire. He never fully understood why, and as he grew stronger, so did his resentment—even if his mother’s reasons had been pure. “There’s a lot of Sophie’s Choice going on here, where these are impossible situations that we are being forced to reckon with,” says Nielsen. “There is an authoritarian power that is parading as if it were still somehow the vestiges of a Republican government. Inside of this travesty are human beings who are caught in this gamesmanship and power. That is what I find always so interesting in Ridley’s stories. He’s really showing the effect of power on people and what happens in a place where power is unrestrained.”
Mescal saw meaning in the story beyond the thrill of men clashing swords, fighting wild animals, or staging deadly combat for the amusement of the masses. Asked what Gladiator II is really about, he says, “What human beings will do to survive, but also what human beings will do to win. We see that in the arena, but also in the political struggle that’s going on outside of my character’s storyline, where you see there’s other characters striving and pulling for power. Where’s the space for humanity? Where’s the space for love, familial connection? And ultimately, will those things overcome this kind of greed and power? Those things are oftentimes directly in conflict with each other.”
The actor speaks more affectionately about the Gladiator II script than Crowe ever did about the original screenplay for the first movie. Crowe has often claimed that he nearly quit the movie because he thought there were only about 26 useful pages in the script. Crowe has said he and Scott reworked the story during filming into the successful film that ultimately arrived onscreen. Asked if she remembered that from the first movie, Nielsen laughs and says: “I remember Russell feeling like that. I remember that he definitely had some thoughts and feelings.”
“Ridley’s process tends to be extremely collaborative,” she adds. “He is extremely open to suggestions and ideas, which is what makes him a dream director in that way. He hears you, he sees you, and I, for one, come up every morning with my list of ideas that I run by him. He will go, “Yes, interesting…okay.…no, that’s way too much.…yep.’ I know that I’ll get some things through. And then there are things where [he follows] his instinct about the movie that he’s wanting to make. That was the same on Gladiator I. That’s why someone like him could handle someone like Russell saying, ‘There are only 23 pages that are workable.’ Another director would say, ‘Well, fuck you too—and do it over there, please.’”
As Gladiator II begins, Mescal’s Lucius has a wife and child, and lives a relatively peaceful life with them until conquerors from his homeland begin to encroach. “He’s taken root in a seacoast town in Numidia. He’s a blue-eyed, fair-skinned man with red hair, and he couldn’t be more different from the inhabitants,” Scott says. “It’s one of the last surviving civilizations, as the Romans begin to descend in North Africa and take it all over.”