Gladiator II: Paul Mescal, Connie Nielsen and Fred Hechinger on the legacy of Ridley Scott’s original film

“The Colosseum was built in the same spot that they had built it for the first film,” actor Fred Hechinger excitedly offered up.

For the first Gladiator, legendary filmmaker Ridley Scott built a smaller-scale replica of Rome’s formidable Colosseum in Malta, and 24 years later, his crew erected it again for the sequel.

Background actors filled the stands, bedecked in togas and screaming in full volume, portraying the mob of spectators that turned out for a spectacle of blood sport and unforgiving gladiatorial conquest.

For Paul Mescal, the Oscar-nominated Irish actor who stepped into some intimidating sandals, having swathes of extras made it feel as if it really was hallowed ground for performance.

“Particularly in scenes when Lucius is addressing the public from the Colosseum, it was a wonderful theatre space,” he told The Nightly. “You feel the gravitas of what those moments mean.”

The word gravitas has its roots in Latin, as does the word legacy, so it’s apt that both hang over Gladiator II due to the outsized love for Scott’s original film, released in 2000 with Russell Crowe as the heroic Maximus Decimus Meridius, father to a murdered son, husband to a murdered wife. He exacted his vengeance.

When there’s almost a quarter century between the original film and a follow-up, usually it would be tagged as “long-awaited” or “anticipated” but as with many revivals of a beloved classic, it’s a mixed bag of expectations.

“Ten years ago, people started to tell me they were thinking (of making another Gladiator) but then it was, maybe it’s going to be too hard,” Connie Nielsen said. “It is almost too much of a dare because people are so attached to the first one.

“There was definitely a lot of fear, and ‘We don’t want to offend that movie’, but Ridley came up with this great story, and it just works.”

Nielsen is one of two actors from the original film to grace Gladiator II (the other is Derek Jacobi who comes back as Senator Gracchus), reprising her role as Lucilla, the daughter of Marcus Aurelius and sister to Joaquin Phoenix’s Commodus.

She also happened to be a former lover of Maximus and her son Lucius, 12 years old in the first film, was implied to be his.

That parentage is confirmed in Gladiator II (and in the trailer) and forms its emotional throughline as Lucius, smuggled off to Africa as a child, returns to Rome as an enslaved fighter set on revenge against Rome, the imperial power whose conquest killed his wife and destroyed his adopted home.

The state has fallen well away from Marcus Aurelius’s dream of Rome, ruled by two erratic Emperors Geta (Joe Quinn) and Caracalla (Hechinger) who distract the masses with ever-more brutal gladiatorial battles.

As the adult Lucius (now 28 years old – while 24 years have passed in the real world, the story is set 16 years later), even with a cast that also includes a deliciously villainous Denzel Washington and an at-peak Pedro Pascal, it’s Mescal that carries the responsibility of Gladiator and Crowe’s legacy.

But it’s something he didn’t allow himself to think about when they were filming. “It would’ve taken up too much space, and it’s not particularly useful because my character isn’t aware of his bloodline for a lot of the film, so I’d be playing the end of the film before living the beginning.

“Legacy is a word that’s prescribed to the first film, quite rightly, but ultimately it’s not a present tense word, and it’s so important to remain in the present when you’re shooting a film.”

Mescal is an actor’s actor. He’s a considered and thoughtful performer who earned that Oscar nod at 26 years old, for a superb but little-seen drama called Aftersun.

Mescal broke out with his first screen role in the 2020 miniseries Normal People, which was certainly a hit but wasn’t what the industry calls a “four-segment” title, a classification inferred upon blockbuster projects that work for all demographics. Gladiator II is expected to be that.

After Normal People, Mescal took on a raft of indie movies including two filmed in Australia (Carmen and Foe), the LGBTQI romantic ghost story All of Us Strangers with countryman Andrew Scott, and The Lost Daughter with Olivia Colman.

He is a household name but only in households with either cinephiles or perpetually online young women who has deemed him one of the “internet’s boyfriends”. Gladiator II with a production budget running in the hundreds of millions will be, by far, the most high-profile thing Mescal has ever been in.

A veteran in the Gladiator world, Nielsen even told him and her new co-stars that this is likely to be the biggest movie they’ll ever make.

Mescal didn’t even pause for a moment. “I would’ve hesitated around films of this scale in broad conversations but with Ridley involved, the fact that there was lots of space for performance in a film like this, it was totally a ‘Yes’.”

He also wouldn’t allow himself to be concerned with the total loss of anonymity that will inevitably follow. Not yet, anyway. “I’m just going to think about that further down the line and then see what comes in the next couple of months,” he said.

Mescal may not have thought about the legacy of the original film during production, but it will very much be part of the conversation once Gladiator II is released in two weeks.

If there’s one person who will bear whatever may come more than him, it’ll be Scott. Just as Scott was the reason Mescal even entertained joining the project, he is also the reason everyone else did.

Hechinger said Scott’s name was why it was “easy to take that leap of faith” that there will be a marriage of respecting what everyone loved about the 2000 movie and crafting a sequel that is its own thing.

For all those fans who still proclaim Gladiator as their favourite movie, for all the men who are constantly thinking about the Roman Empire, Scott is the reason they’re willing to step back into that Colosseum, even one built in Malta.

For Mescal, Scott is the “only man who could have done it”.

Gladiator II is in cinemas from Thursday, November 14