A ship-to-shore invasion with fleets of Roman battleships fighting with trebuchets and thousands of archers. A naval duel to the death inside a flooded, shark-infested coliseum. A fight against a rampaging rhino, and hand-to-hand combat with a pissed-off hairless, snarling, possibly rabid baboon. Nobody does these things as well, or efficiently, as Ridley Scott, and with Gladiator II he’s topped the action of the Oscar-winning 2000 original, in a reflection of a more cruel, decadent and crumbling Rome, plagued by years of upheaval since the death of Russell Crowe’s rebel leader Maximus.
Gladiator took home five awards from 12 nominations, including Best Picture and Best Actor for Crowe. But there was nothing for Scott, the most accomplished and successful living filmmaker yet to win an Oscar for Best Director. Despite his groundbreaking work on sci-fi classics Alien (1979) and Blade Runner (1982), he has been nominated just three times, in 1992 for Thelma & Louise (when Jonathan Demme won for The Silence of the Lambs), in 2001 for Gladiator (when Steven Soderbergh won for Traffic), and in 2002 for Blackhawk Down (when Ron Howard won for A Beautiful Mind).
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Soon to turn 87, having delivered another epic less than a year after his revolutionary saga Napoleon, Scott believes Gladiator II is his best work to date and most logistically ambitious production so far, costing about $210 million net budget (not unusual for the world creation undertakings Scott seems to prefer). And while they don’t give prizes for such things, he managed to shoot his historical epic in just 51 days, even though he was forced to halt production for half a year because of the SAG-AFTRA strike.
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Napoleon scraped three nominations, all in the technical categories, and if Scott is going to take the long-awaited beeline to accept the Oscar, it will be for the inventive storytelling. Scripted by David Scarpa, Gladiator II has connective tissue, but turns much of it on its ear, elevating their characters above some dusty old toga-wearing cliches. Filling Crowe’s sandals is Paul Mescal as Lucius, the adult son of Maximus and Lucilla (Connie Nielsen), who has been hiding in the North African province of Numidia.
Lucilla has since remarried, to Marcus Acacius (Pedro Pascal), a decorated Roman general and a favorite of Rome’s debauched twin emperors Geta (Joseph Quinn) and Caracalla (Fred Hechinger). Marcus Acacius is behind the film’s opening battle scene, in which Lucius loses his wife and is enslaved by the Romans. This brings him to the attention of slithery arms dealer Macrinus, a character created by Denzel Washington from scratch, influenced by his own family history of slavery. Unaware of Lucius’s parentage, Macrinus forces Lucius to fight for his freedom, and his life, at the packed-out Colosseum, where, unrecognized by Lucilla, he shows an almost superhuman strength.
Scott’s own personal superpower is that when he reads a script, he visualizes every scene; he knows how he will set up each shot and aim as many as 11 cameras at it so that even the most logistically difficult scene might only require two takes. This might sound constricting but far from it: this way of working leaves him open to finding inspiration and indelible imagery in the moment. That happened on the first Gladiator. Remember the image of Maximus’s hand, gliding through the wheat growing in the fields approaching his estate? Russell Crowe wasn’t even in the country for that.
During some pick-up scenes in Italy, Crowe’s stand-in snuck off for a cigarette, running his hand through the wheat as he did so. Spotting him, Scott shouted at him to stop. “Put out that f–king cigarette before you burn that field,” he barked, “and someone get me a camera.” Thus was born one of the most memorable scenes, and Gladiator II harks back to it several times. Crowe has since noted other examples that he and Scott found in the moment, such as the two-sword decapitation scene before Maximus asks the crowd, “Are you not entertained?” Mescal replicates that too.
Something else that might surprise you about Scott is that he’s not too busy to binge watch TV and small indie films, mostly because it’s the best way to find the stars of the future. Scott saw enough episodes of the Ireland-set BBC TV series Normal People to believe that its leading man Paul Mescal had the chops to rise to hero stature. Further investigation revealed that, as well as an impressive stage background, the 28-year-old had form as a sportsman, playing the highly physical game of rugby.
“Couldn’t have seen that coming on the bingo card,” laughs Mescal. “I wouldn’t have said while making Normal People, ‘Do you know what? Ridley Scott’s going to see this, and he’s going to say, That’s my guy for rolling around in the sand in the Colosseum.’ But I think if you really unpack that, I think why he cast me is, regardless of the scale and the kind of action that is required, you need somebody who is equally invested in the emotional language of the film. That’s something that I pride myself on, and it’s something that I’m drawn to for sure.”
Still, the rugby thing helped. “I did break my nose, my jaw,” says Mescal. “And three fingers and two toes. So, what’s that, seven or eight [bones], depending on how you look at it?”
How did that compare to the Gladiator II shoot? “I came out of that relatively unscathed,” he says, “mostly thanks to my trainer and the way we approached it. We didn’t want to go for something that was purely aesthetic, we wanted to build a body that was capable of inflicting damage and taking damage, because I wanted to do my own stunts. And there’s no way that you can fake it when you shoot a Ridley Scott film with eight cameras and you’re on camera the whole time. So, we just had to make the muscles big and make myself able to take some impact. But I didn’t come out of it with any major injuries.”
During the casting, Mescal knew other names were being floated for the role. The first film not only won Russell Crowe the Oscar, but it also made him as a global superstar. “[The audition] was organized incredibly quickly,” says Mescal, “and it was a Zoom that lasted no longer than 30 minutes. Ridley’s time is very precious to him, so it’s like there’s no fat on the bone. We’re getting straight to the point. We talked very little about the film, initially. We spoke about the general arc of Lucius for about 10 minutes, and then we spoke about everything in between for another 20. And then we didn’t actually speak again until I’d been cast.”
Scott originally cast Crowe at the suggestion of his friend Michael Mann, who’d then just put the actor through his paces in The Insider. He felt Crowe had the natural intensity to play a general hellbent on avenging his slain family. Mescal’s Lucius has a similar trigger, but he’s much younger and less experienced. What did Scott see in Mescal?
“Paul had a different kind of energy,” says Scott. “Russell’s was right there on the surface; you can feel his confidence in being a general who basically won the war and brought peace to Rome. Paul is much less fully formed, but he is big and strapping. I don’t know if he was pro, but he was nearly that in Irish rugby, and all that physicality helped. Honestly, if you’ve got half the physicality, you can master the rest of the learning curve. Putting on muscle weight is a matter of good diet, lots of exercise, and having a big guy standing over you saying, ‘Where were you? You’re five minutes late!’ So, you’re putting on 10 or 15 pounds of muscle, and the whole demeanor changes when you’re putting on that physicality.”
How did that work with Crowe? “When I saw Russell after The Insider, he had put on some weight, he had a bit of a tummy and kept talking about how he would promise to lose it to do Maximus. But Russell naturally is a bit of a boiling kettle, always on the edge of boil. Paul is a different creature coming from a different direction, but the kettle will boil over, if needed. And he knows where to go, because his first love is theater. I respect the theatrical side of that. It gives the actor an encyclopedia of emotions to draw down on and know how to get there.”
Still, Mescal may be filling big sandals, but Scott gave the actor room to find his own lane so as not to clone one of the most indelible action performances in the last 50 years.
“That was the most important thing with a sequel to a film that’s so beloved in the first place,” says Mescal. “The only way I could really go into it was with Ridley giving me the space — which he did — to make Lucius as identifiable as Maximus is. I think the context for both of those characters is very different. You’ve got the kind of nobility of Russell in the first one, and you’ve got the latent anger and chaos of Lucius in the second. They’re fighting for very different things, motivated by very different things. Ultimately, at the end of the film they’re more similar than they are at the beginning. It was about making the first two acts of the film, almost like them not being in conversation, those two performances. And then toward the end of the film, you start seeing the fusion of father and son.”
The one quality they share is an unquenchable thirst for revenge. When Commodus kills his father Marcus Aurelius after the ruler told his son that Maximus would be the best leader for the Roman Empire, Commodus then cruelly slaughters his rival’s wife and son. That gives Maximus a singular purpose that drives his savagery in the arena.
Lucius’ motivation is set early on. While Maximus’ leadership of Roman troops against the barbarian horde in Gladiator seemed righteous, Lucius starts the sequel as one of the latter. Having been exiled for his own protection by his mother, we see Lucius has a life, and a warrior wife. This time, the Romans invading by sea are the bloodthirsty, conquering pillagers, and when Pedro Pascal’s Roman general Marcus Acacius kills his other half, Lucius has all the rage he needs for his journey. And once again, the shortest route to the Roman elite is through the dark tunnel leading into the gladiatorial arena.
“You see Lucius in a scene in the cart when he’s arriving back in Rome after he’s been captured,” says Scott. “He’s talking to his fellow gladiators about what Rome represents to him, and he has a strong hatred for what it is. I think he’s one of the few people probably in that time [who understands]. That is the context of coming from nobility and knowing the privileges and understanding of what that nobility did to the rest of the world. Rome took his wife from him. There’s a huge gap between his lived experience before he was seven or eight to what he can see now — the wood from the trees, essentially. He’s got a balanced understanding about what makes Rome and the Roman Empire so extraordinary, but also what makes it one of the most brutal conquering forces in history.”
Finding that storyline might seem obvious now, but the biggest reason for the 25-year gap between I and II was that they just couldn’t figure out how to ramp up another when the two main characters — Joaquin Phoenix’s Commodus and Crowe’s Maximus — lay dead in the sands of the Colusseum at the end of the movie.
“It really took us 20 years,” says producer Doug Wick, who oversaw development with his partner Lucy Fisher. “We had tried to develop one 10 years ago, and we weren’t happy with it. Everyone agreed that we were never going to put out some kind of money grab because the first movie had gone too well. So, these are the problems that we wrestled with, and we were very aware of the impression the first movie made. We had to honor that, but also give people a story that felt like it was worth telling on its own.”
One stab was taken by musician Nick Cave, who proffered a version at the behest of Crowe that had Maximus being sent back to Earth by the gods to kill Jesus Christ and his followers, because he was stealing their thunder. Given the derisive response to Todd Phillips’ Joker sequel staged as a musical, I suggest it was better that they kept developing.
“Nick Cave did a great job of invention and Russell was fully engaged,” Scott recalls. “We all were, but I was the one dragging my feet. I was like, ‘I dunno about this.’ I thought we were getting too far off the mark, and if you do that, that’s where you can lose it. I was going along with the boys. I didn’t really believe in it. It got too rich and started to go to time warps, which frankly I thought was bloody silly. But the one thing I added to it was this great idea of [opening] a portal of time in death, and it would have to come from the dying soul of a dying soldier in a battlefield. Isn’t that cool?” It is, I agree. But what do you do with it? “I kept it as a little silver bullet, thinking, I’ll use that again somewhere.”
Scott also introduced the character of Lucius’s wife, the love of his life. “Right now, many women, certainly in the Middle East and especially Israel, are soldiers,” he explains. “I saw her as a woman living on the edges of this city, in a kibbutz. I saw her as a housewife but then you realize, ‘Oh god, she’s got a bow.’ Movies can do this brilliantly. You realize she’s also a soldier, an archer, a markswoman.”
That came out of development of the version they didn’t use, but they still had to find a story that could survive without Crowe. “We started off the first movie where the Roman general Maximus is the hero against the freedom fighters,” says Wick. “So, now we would start off with the freedom fighters and with Pedro Pascal as basically the enemy, the Roman general. That’s when we knew we had a movie, and it would be some version of a homecoming. Everything was discussed over several years, for example, the antagonist. No one wanted another emperor as the antagonist. So, then you start to talk about it: OK, what would be a great antagonist? Because the goal when you make a period film is always to make it feel like it could be a film about now. What would feel right now? Well, there’s nothing like a billionaire who’s buying influence in the capital or the world, which was the starting point for the creation of Denzel’s Macrinus.”
The long road to getting the story straight, however, was to prove much easier than staging some of the craziest battles ever seen on a movie screen. Scott and his producers wanted to have a giant rhino in the first film, but the technology wasn’t there.
“This was different, because the first movie had to be made on a budget,” says Wick. “Back then, everyone said sword and sandal was dead. Russell Crowe was untested. It was a much bigger risk. This time, everyone came in with the common belief that the fights had to be escalated, that there had to be an increased theatricality. We’d made the audience wait for 23 years. Paramount came on as partner. We still saw budgets that were too high, and we would have a meeting where we would be with Ridley and all the visual effects people. Since Ridley has everything in his head, he can easily say, ‘Oh, I don’t need that. I need this.’ Ridley also has produced commercials all these years, so he is most practical about what he feels essential and what isn’t.”
All agreed there would be no scrimping on the scenes that needed to top those from the original. “At every budget conversation we had to defend why we felt the need to have the naval battle and the rhinoceros. Those were really the two biggest ones. The opening battle also, that was big. These were initially much bigger than they needed to be, but we fought for them because it had to be a bigger spectacle than before.”
The scene that provoked the biggest reaction this time around is the baboon brawl that Lucius faces, an attack even crazier than the tigers that ambushed Maximus in the original. The idea came to Scott while he was filming the pilot for the HBO Max series Raised by Wolves in South Africa. “We were in a kind of safari park, with all the animals in the world wandering around,” he says. “It’s a place where visitors park their cars with their coffee lattes. There was a little group of baboons that sat on a wall, staring at the tourists. One idiot walks across to a big baboon, and he tries to pat it. And this thing just attacked him. He was a big man, but the guy dropped his coffee and ran for his car, getting clawed as he struggled to get in the car. I thought it was funny, but what was there was the physicality. It knew when to defend, kill, and attack. Baboons are carnivorous animals, and a big baboon could be 40 or 50 pounds. Try and wrestle a 20-pound Jack Russell and you’ll lose. A 50-pound baboon? You’ll lose your arm and your head. Can you hang from a beam by one arm for two hours? No, but they can.”
How to convey such brutality? “I cast 12 very small stuntmen,” Scott said. “Some were tough teens but they’re quite tiny. I put them all in black tights and, for fun, I painted whiskers on them. Then we went to war, and it became this stuntman brawl of savagery. So, then I had all the physicality recorded of the actors. I removed the guys in black tights, put in wire frames of baboons, where it looks good, and the movements look real. You then put on the flesh and hair. And then you’ve got a master work of digital right there, and you change nothing into a furry, snarling baboon.”
Having witnessed the attack in South Africa, Scott was able to defend a complaint that his alpha baboon didn’t look like the ones you see at the zoo. “Some guy says to me, ‘I’ve never seen a baboon like that before.’ I said, ‘Well, he’s got alopecia, you know what that is? It’s when you lose all your f–king hair.’ I told him, I copied this baboon from that park. It had alopecia, so everything was sinew and tendon with no fat, like muscular steel. I said, ‘That’s my monster.’ That’s when I said, ‘Paul, you know what? It would be cool if you turn the tables on the baboon. If you bite the baboon, the baboon will be psychologically in shock. And snarl back when the baboon goes, Holy s–t.’ It was meant to be funny, but it worked.”
How did all this look to the producers watching from a short distance? “We talked at length about the first movie, where, obviously, it was clear why Russell Crowe’s Maximus would win in the arena,” says Wick. “He was a great warrior. The question with this kid Lucius was, why would he win in the arena? And we talked and bored each other with the thematics, and came down to how anger and rage would fuel him. But that’s still only an idea.
“And then Ridley, in the midst of all those conversations says, ‘OK, in that baboon fight, Lucius is furious because his mentor has just been killed. The alpha baboon comes at him, and Lucius is so enraged that he bites the alpha baboon in the arm and spits out a mouthful of fur.’ Well, that completely shows the audience, perfectly dramatizes Lucius’s ability in the arena based on the anger that fueled him.”
Producer Michael Pruss — who runs the film portion of Scott Free and also worked with the director on Napoleon and Alien: Romulus — has become accustomed to the filmmaker’s style, but still is left gobsmacked now and then.
“Ridley always says to me, he runs his set like a benevolent dictatorship,” says Pruss. “I see that in the way he works: He’s the four-star general, and he goes into battle with all his troops. The military comparison is right, because Ridley’s father was a military man, involved in rebuilding Germany after the Second World War. Clearly, he was a man of great pedigree and intellect and a doer and a stern character. I think I see that in Ridley too. He runs his sets like a general would. It’s like we’re getting ready to go into battle and Ridley’s the general leading us over the trench, and you just run, knowing you are so well marshaled. Everybody knows their roles, everybody has the eye on the details, so there won’t be any faltering. And under Ridley’s stewardship, we all know where we’re supposed to be and what we’re supposed to do. He sets the tone, and then we have to rise to his level.”
“The baboon scene plays like one of the most terrifying and exhilarating set pieces of the film,” Pruss continues. “Watching it felt like an enormous stage play, a bunch of guys in their costumes hopping around this big arena in Morocco, and you felt like it could have been experimental theater had you just walked in and not known what it was. But it’s Ridley, so there are 11 cameras, and every actor knows exactly where he’s falling, what his reaction should be when he’s bitten, or he meets his end or doesn’t meet his end. It took a day and a half. I was in awe of how he directs these scenes and knows every part of the visual language of a scene, whether that’s an intimate scene with Paul and Connie, or whether it’s a gnarly, violent set piece where you’re on the edge of your seat.
“The fact that Ridley throughout his career has managed to balance incredible spectacle with intimacy and emotion tells you everything you need to know,” he adds. “I was reminded of watching the first Gladiator with my father at the Odeon Cinema in Romford near London. I could never have honestly imagined that, 25 years later, I’d be part of the producing team on the sequel. Life is full of surprises and unpredictability that takes you to places you never thought possible, and I have just been incredibly lucky to find myself in Ridley’s world, to learn from his mastery of the craft.”
Denzel Washington is used to carrying the ball physically in his movies, but this time his character, Macrinus, is playing politics. He’s also played the heavy several times, from his Oscar-winning turn in Training Day to his work in American Gangster, in which his Harlem drug lord smuggles heroin in the coffins of soldiers killed in Vietnam. In both roles he keeps his intentions veiled until he wants you to know his true self. “He didn’t show it at the time, but I think he really enjoyed doing American Gangster with me,” says Scott. “I think the film was honestly terrific, one of my better movies.”
To get Washington on board, Scott showed him a painting by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, a 19th-century artist. “His work in Roman and Greek circumstance, they are spectacular,” he says. “There was a painting which I think defines the Macrinus: a guy standing there, with huge forearms. He’s African, superlatively powerful, and he’s wearing beautiful silk — orange and sky-blue silk — and he’s got a beard that hits a point. He’s got a hat on the back of his head; it looks a bit like a Dizzy Gillespie hat but woven with beads and whatever else they used back then. Denzel said, ‘What does he do?’ I said, ‘Well, he’s a billionaire.’ He said, ‘Oh, OK, send me the script.’”
Like Lucius, Macrinus also has a backstory that gives him grievance with the most powerful people in Rome. He was a slave, one that was horribly abused but fought his way to freedom and affluence in the gladiatorial arena. Now, he has a stable of gladiators that cement his place in high society. “We did easily 50 drafts, with evolution each time,” says Wick. “Ridley will do this thing where he’ll take your 120-page script and reduce it to 50 pages just to look at the bones and see if they’re working. There was a lot of deliberation on how much to reveal with Denzel’s character.”
Lucy Fisher said they decided that they didn’t need much because of the actor playing him. “Everything was really deeply explored,” she says, “and then with each exploration, you’d get new storyboards from Ridley, who gave you the visual equivalent of whatever you were discussing. Denzel, because he is such a strong presence as an actor, his abilities transcend dialogue. He delivers dialogue gracefully, but he brings so much more dimension than you could even imagine whenever he’s on screen. So, we decided to toss that backstory. We needed to go through those earlier drafts to build his character, but Denzel brings such strength to the performance, you don’t need the backstory.”
In creating the role, Washington said he didn’t need to trace back to Roman history to find his Macrinus: He had his own family history to rely on. “My last name is Washington,” he says, “Why do you think that is?”
“Benjamin Corbin Washington,” he continues. “Look him up. I forget if he’s the grandson of George Washington, or cousin, but he owned my family, my great-great-grandfather. So that side of slavery is there in my family. My grandfather was born in 1864, I believe, so just this side of slavery. And then my father was born in 1909, as a free man. I still own the land that my great-great-grandfather bought under our name. Black men couldn’t own land in America in those days, and my great-great-grandfather married a Native American and bought land at a dollar 75 an acre, because he couldn’t own it. And now we own it. Macrinus was a lot closer to slavery than I am, obviously, but it is the same set of circumstances.”
In Washington’s mind there was one major difference. “I was raised by a man of god, so I was taught that god is love,” he said. “So, I was taught love. That was obviously not the case with Macrinus. His was a life of pain and death, and he found a way to claw his way out and was determined to never be owned, never be dominated, never be controlled, never have to answer to anyone else. And he was willing to sell his soul, art, body and anything else, to get what he wants.”
What was different about working with Scott after the 17 years since American Gangster? “I call him the governor,” Washington says. “The word I hear is ‘evolve’. But the first Gladiator, it won Best Picture, and I guess it was a film that directed itself. I would never use the word evolve. He was a great director back then, and he will be for all time.”
Washington spends most of Gladiator II playing power games above the gladiator arena, but the experience has only whetted his appetite for when he plays the Carthaginian leader Hannibal, who with his troops attacked Rome with elephants. Antoine Fuqua, who directed the Equalizer trilogy and Training Day, is prepping that one, and Washington is already getting in shape. “I’m producing and starring in Hannibal next fall,” Washington says. “I’ll do Othello onstage starting in February, and it feels like Gladiator II was preparation for Othello, which will be preparation for Hannibal. I’m in the gym now. I looked at a photograph of myself at an Academy Awards, and I was 250 pounds. Those days are over. I’m on my way to 180, and I’ll be ready for my Hannibal fitting. I’m not where I want to be, but I ain’t where I was.”
Also making an entrance into the Gladiator universe is Pedro Pascal, as Marcus Acasius. Born in Santiago, Chile in 1975, Pascal grew up with Scott’s films, naming Blade Runner, Alien and Thelma and Louise as three of his favorite movies (“There’s no other filmmaker in the world that has three movies on my nerdy Top 10”).
“My parents immigrated to the States when I was just a baby,” he recalls, “and the sponge-like way that I absorbed movies and entertainment of that era meant that the ones that Ridley made early in his career imprinted themselves onto my development and into my imagination.”
Pascal saw the first Gladiator movie when it came out, and it struck him emotionally more than as a particularly awesome piece of entertainment. “I remember at the end of the movie,” he says, “and Connie’s line telling Maximus to ‘go to them’. The idea of him spiritually being reunited with his loved ones, that throttled me, because I saw the movie not long after I lost my mom that same year. I can’t say I believe in that sort of an afterlife or that I’ll ever see her again, but I remember the comfort that gave me was really, really powerful. And I had to go back and see it again just to feel that again.”
The experience of shooting, he recalls, lived up to his expectations. “It was unlike any experience I’ve had or am likely to have again,” he notes, “and everyone says the same. He composes the entire world visually. And I suppose, technically, he has to because he has so many cameras set up for one take, whether it be something intimate between two characters or it’s the Roman army invading North Africa with battleships against a fortified wall. He will shoot stuff like that from start to finish, and that is just nothing I’ve experienced before.”
Pascal also cites Scott’s insistence on building his sets as realistically as possible as being part of his directorial genius. “It’s so utterly immersive, with all of the soldiers, the wailing women and everything. He makes these fully, fully realized tableaux and scenarios so that you can basically be in the world and there’s barely anything left to the imagination. It’s a dream. Sometimes I’ll need more takes if there’s more work that my mind needs to do in order to believe in the world that I’m acting in. But on his sets, since everything is available to you, you don’t need more takes because it’s all there. And so that does so much of the work. And so, I find it very, very technically complicated and strangely very actor friendly.”
And as an actor, Pascal relished the script, with its interwoven intrigues and accent on conflict. “Conflict is the kind of thing you don’t want in life, but you want in a role,” he says. “The more conflict there is, the more you have to anchor yourself to. And it was nice to play somebody who is, at the end of the day, very straightforward and identified very much by movements of the story. And then see his loyalties reveal themselves, and you see a kind of bloodthirsty fighter who really is loyal to one woman in her value system. And then the more tragic it can be, the better.”
About the only familiar face from the original Gladiator is Connie Nielsen, returning as the mother of Lucius, the former lover of Maximus, now the wife of Marcus Acacius. Nielsen has been intrigued by Lucilla’s tenuous relationship to power since the first film. The levers are different this time — she spent most of the original evading her pawing brother Commodus — but the gender boundaries barring her way are still there.
“The experience of not giving women the power that they are due is certainly as pertinent today as it was 2,000 years ago,” she says. “I don’t think we’ve evolved a lot, and the Romans were certainly as misogynistic as the ancient Greeks were, but they also at the same time revered women as a certain goddess power. I really felt like I was bringing to Lucilla a lot of that goddess power. At the time, people lived in a very sort of fluid, spiritual manner. Their ancestors were very present in their lives and were represented in small, unique rituals every day, and they were mediated basically by yourself and never necessarily by a priest. It was between you and your ancestors. I wanted to bring that into Lucilla as much as was there in the first one, when she takes over from her father as the conscience of Commodus.”
Gladiator II, she explains, “comes after 80 years of a golden age in Rome, an absolute golden age with amazing leaders, philosopher-leaders who have subjugated their own egos to serve the nation. Where we find Lucilla is in the space that is inevitable when power has lost its moral legitimacy. Lucilla stands as the only surviving emblem of moral legitimacy for the empire, and she’s being used as such. In fact, she has been held hostage to her name without which she would most certainly be dead in the intervening 18 years or 20 years since the death of Commodus.”
As with others working on the movie, she saw parallels with the present day. “I found it to be such an historically rich moment in which to position Lucilla,” she says, “and I also found an outlet for my own personally felt anxiety about the rise of authoritarianism, which had been vanquished during the time of my grandmother. I think it is causing a lot of anxiety to a lot of people around the globe. And that loss of ascendancy and of values is sort of what you see Lucilla building on over and over again. She can’t help herself. She’s bound by her upbringing, her sense of righteousness and her sense of decency. She understands that, yes, you can kill the person, but you cannot kill a state of mind, because it keeps on going.”
This puts her in the most dangerous place. “She’s in quite a bind because here she’s got her beloved son, who she sent away to save his life because the Romans would wipe out lineages to prevent problems in the future. But she’s also got a good man [Pascal’s Marcus Acacius] and they’re on a collision course.”
Nielsen talked to Scott about the centrality of that plot point. “I said to him, ‘It’s so evil and so genius all at once, the situation that you’re putting her in. My son has every reason to hate the very person I love. And, by loving him, I put myself further into the cauldron of his rage. As a mother, you will just do anything for your children. But, at the same time, I’m also a happily married woman. I just felt that that was such an incredible and deliciously rich space to create a Lucilla from.”
The actress says she’s never been shy about questioning the motives of her character but does admit that she thought she’d killed her chance to play Lucilla in the first Gladiator. “Ridley called me and asked me what I had thought about the latest draft,” she laughs, “and I said, ‘Well, this is where I’m seeing an issue because blah, blah, blah.’ I was like, ‘That kind of word just didn’t even exist at the time, it’s weird that I would be using it. It’s culturally and historically wrong. It just won’t work…’ And he said, ‘OK, stop. Write everything down and send it to me.’ So, I wrote 20 pages because I was a young and very hungry artist, and I wanted to put my mark on this incredible story.
“I sent all of that stuff and after three days, I hadn’t heard back from him, and I was absolutely sure that I’d been fired. “I was like, ‘Oh my god, why can’t you keep your mouth shut, Connie? You had to go there, didn’t you?’ And then after three days, I called his office, and said, ‘Listen, I haven’t slept in three nights, so can you just please ask him to get on the phone, so I know whether I’m fired or not?’ And then Ridley comes on and he’s laughing. He says, ‘No, you’re not fired, Connie, go to sleep. You’re fine. I’m just trying to remove the most offensive parts of your notes so that I can send them off.’”
Nielsen said he incorporated many of her changes, put some lines in the mouths of other actors. But mostly, he made her feel he was listening. And it encouraged her and other cast members to find resonance in moments by taking chances.
“‘Strength and honor,’ that’s a beautiful line that we found in the first film,” says Scott, “and when Connie’s Lucilla says it to Paul in his cell, Paul picks that moment up spectacularly and answers as if almost in surprise that she says to him: Be strong. And he applies the same line, with the deepest respect to his mother.
“That’s one of the most emotional moments in the film. A line like that can either be nothing or something. It’s called great acting.”