Gladiator II: Paul Mescal takes on the Colosseum, and his biggest role by far, in Ridley Scott’s epic sequel

Irish actor Paul Mescal enjoys a very specific kind of fame. Mention his name to anyone who has seen his work in the romantic psychological drama Normal People, and the response will be somewhere on the spectrum of obsession. Mescal’s recent performances on the big screen — from an Oscar-nominated turn in Aftersun to a heart-wrenching role in the devastating All Of Us Strangers — have only deepened that obsession. A fan lingering outside the Sydney hotel where STM will interview the 28-year-old says she has seen all of his work, and is hoping to have him sign her arm, so she can get the signature tattooed on her body. For all of the fan fervour, Mescal is not a bona fide Hollywood superstar, although that seems set to change with his starring role in Ridley Scott’s hotly anticipated Gladiator II. Arriving nearly 25 years since audiences around the world watched Russell Crowe’s Maximus die in the Colosseum, this sequel casts Mescal in the role of Lucius, who was just a boy in the original. Lucius, son of Lucilla (Connie Nielsen), had a front-row seat as Maximus got his bloody revenge on the kid’s uncle, Emperor Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix). That’s the sort of thing that stays with a boy, and the new movie finds Lucius all grown up and forced to fight for his own life (and revenge) on the same Colosseum sand, as Machiavellian forces threaten to topple Rome. As far as blockbuster debuts go, Mescal’s is as ambitious as it gets, and it all started with a 30-minute Zoom call with Scott. “Talking to Ridley when you haven’t met him before comes with this kind of latent pressure, because you idolise him so much,” Mescal tells STM. The director got straight to the point, laid out his vision for the sequel, and, having secured the actor’s involvement, essentially maintained radio silence until just before the first scenes began shooting in Morocco. They say no news is good news, but that doesn’t really apply to an actor contemplating the biggest role of his (or most people’s) career. “That bit was probably the hardest time, because that’s when your mind is just full of spiders that are kind of like in conversation with each other,” Mescal admits. “But you just have to go to work, you go to the gym, you do all the preparation you can do, and then, actually when you start doing your job and you arrive on set, it’s more familiar territory for you.” For someone with Mescal’s resume, which is filled with deeply emotional, intimate indie filmmaking, it seems likely he wasn’t entirely familiar with what confronted him on the set of Gladiator II. One scene, for example, has Lucius battling freshly shaven baboons in a far-flung corner of the Roman empire. Freshly shaven baboons, even CG ones, are the stuff nightmares are made of, and this sequence of gladiatorial brutality represents the most obvious departure from Mescal’s previous work. The Irishman says Scott’s “great gift to actors” is eschewing green screens wherever possible and making such sequences feel realistic. “The baboons, for example, were stunt men in kind of lycra CGI suits, but they had trained to simulate the movement of a baboon,” Mescal explains. “So, for me, it was a gift to have these incredibly talented individuals to fight against. But yeah, that was a brutal, brutal day.” Talking about incredibly talented individuals, dual Oscar-winner Denzel Washington appears in the sequel as Macrinus, a slave turned gladiator owner who has his own agenda, while Pedro Pascal plays General Acacius, Lucilla’s new husband and object of Lucius’ fury. The film also features White Lotus star Fred Hechinger and Strangers Things alum Joseph Quinn, as sibling emperors Caracalla and Geta, whose real-life reign was notable as much for its excesses as bloodshed. Excess is the name of the game in Scott’s sequel, with the director harnessing improvements in technology to fully realise action sequences that simply weren’t achievable in the original. The Colosseum, for example, which Scott recreated for the production in Malta, is flooded in one scene, so the emperors could be treated to a naval battle. As far-fetched as it seems, there’s some historical basis behind the sequence. “It’s funny because I kept having this experience where I would read the script and think, ‘This is great, but they’re taking a lot of liberties here’,” Hechinger tells STM. “And then, in the preparation period, in the actual research, I found a lot of the crazier things are the things that are true. “These big naval battles, the huge water fight, it all happened. And fighting of animals, all these insane things really happened. And so that engagement with history was very exciting.” Scott didn’t need filmmaking trickery to make the fight scenes visceral — the heat did that for him. “It was incredibly hot in the Colosseum, because it was peak summer in Malta, and there was a two to three-week period where it was back-to-back fight scenes,” Mescal reveals. “I couldn’t get enough fluids into me.” The result was the actor got progressively more exhausted as the production went on, which mirrored the journey of his character. “I think the danger with films like this sometimes is that you see a character totally expend themselves, and then the next scene they’re like a spring chicken,” Mescal says. “I wanted the impacts that you see Lucius take to be cumulative, and you feel it in the way that he is fighting towards the end of the film. It’s just about survival.” The immense scale of Gladiator II could not be more different to a production such as Aftersun, which was the low-budget debut feature for Scottish director Charlotte Wells. One might assume, therefore, that Mescal bears a lot more responsibility on his shoulders being the face of Scott’s epic, with a budget upwards of $300 million. But the Irish actor doesn’t see it that way. Quite the opposite, in fact. “I think the thing that I’ve learned from doing a film on this scale, the thing that I was nervous about and didn’t know that was going to be the reality, is that the day that I stepped on set for the first time (there) was a huge sense of relief,” he says. “I know what it’s like to lead an independent film, and I didn’t know what it was going to be like in this. But once I stepped on set, I was like, ‘There might be more cameras rolling and there might be more money behind the film, but my job has and will always remain the same’. “Because, ultimately, regardless of whether it’s on stage or whether it’s in a rehearsal space, or whether it’s Aftersun or whether it’s Gladiator, it’s your job to create the inner life of these characters and deliver it to an audience.” And deliver is what Mescal has done. Only this time significantly more people are watching. Gladiator II is in cinemas November 14.