Gladiator II star Paul Mescal wanted to separate himself as much as possible from the first movie.
The Irish actor plays Lucius, who we met as a child in Ridley Scott's Oscar-winning movie Gladiator in 2000. After his home is destroyed by the Roman Empire, a grown-up Lucius becomes a gladiator and seeks revenge while dealing with his secret royal identity.
In an exclusive interview with Digital Spy, Mescal talked about creating his own kind of hero away from the legacy of Russell Crowe's Maximus, and he revealed a couple of measures he took to avoid relying too much on the first Gladiator.
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"I made two decisions," Mescal started.
"One was to not watch the first film again once I'd been cast, and the second one was just play the character that's on the page. If I was to try and play something that was like Maximus, it would have just been boring for me.
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"I don't want to be shooting a film that's going to be, for me, not something that I'm excited to go and do every day."
Mescal also remembered his first day on set, where "you'd walk out and there's something new to see."
"It was all just fucking massive. The first day in Morocco, I was like: this is the biggest set that I've ever been on, and probably ever will be on," he added.
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The actor recalls being overwhelmed "because it was new," but he didn't see it as a problem or a distraction from his acting duties.
"I think I feel on the first day of any film, big or small, there's always a pressure, because you care fundamentally about it, and that doesn't change just because it's a bigger film."
The challenge was, actually, overcoming doubts and fears to do justice to his character.
"Playing a person who's not you, in any context, is always challenging. You always kind of doubt yourself at certain moments, but you're just trying to become a detective about somebody else's life.
"That's something that can just keep you awake, because there's no end point to that journey. Like, you never arrive at the end and go like: I know who this person is fully. You have a suspicion, and you just trying to follow that suspicion."
Mescal is joined in the cast by Denzel Washington, Pedro Pascal, Connie Nielsen, Joseph Quinn and Fred Hechinger.
Following the movie's first reviews, Gladiator 2 has received a 77% critics score on the review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes. It's slightly lower than the 79% awarded to the original film.
Gladiator II is released in UK cinemas on November 15, and in US cinemas on November 22.
Mireia (she/her) has been working as a movie and TV journalist for over eight years. Based in the UK, she is a former deputy movies editor at Digital Spy, and previously worked for the Spanish magazine Fotogramas. Mireia's work has been published in other outlets such as Esquire and Elle in Spain, and WeLoveCinema and GamesRadar+ in the UK. She is also a published author, having written the essay Biblioteca Studio Ghibli: Nicky, la aprendiz de bruja about Hayao Miyazaki's Kiki's Delivery Service.
During her years as a freelance journalist and film critic, Mireia has covered festivals around the world and has interviewed high-profile talents such as Kristen Stewart, Ryan Gosling, Jake Gyllenhaal and many more. She's also taken part in juries such as the FIPRESCI jury at Venice Film Festival and the short film jury at Kingston International Film Festival in London. LinkedIn
