Lucilla doesn’t recognise the battered creature in the Colosseum as her son, and has no idea about the bloody history between him and the man she loves. “She’s a woman who has had a huge loss, and in the middle of that, a gift that is Pedro Pascal,” Nielsen says. “What a gift that guy is. Even to play with, to work with, I just absolutely love him, and he’s so perfect for this role. He is one of those rare actors who really has heart, soul, and at the same time this incredible gift of transformation.”
Naturally, the film eventually finds Lucius and Acacius locking swords again, but then Lucius is prepared to fight everything and everyone. “It’s very ‘angry young man’ drama in that sense. He can see the way Rome has kind of fallen in on itself,” Mescal says. “Rome represents all the personal neglect that he felt as a child. Suddenly he’s thrust back into that world and has direct proximity to all of the things that he thinks he hates and doesn’t feel attached to anymore.”
Throughout Gladiator II, the reluctant hero encounters a number of other colourful and dubious characters. Denzel Washington plays a dashing powerbroker named Macrinus. “Denzel is an arms dealer who supplies food for the armies in Europe, supplies wine and oil, makes steel, makes spears, weapons, cannons, and catapults. So he is a very wealthy man. Instead of having a stable of racehorses, he has a stable of gladiators,” Scott says. “He’s beautiful. He drives a golden Ferrari. I got him a gold-plated chariot.”
Asked if Macrinus is good to his fighters or cruel, the filmmaker scoffs: “To the guys who fight in the arena I guess he’s pretty f*cking cruel, right?”
The leadership of Rome is similarly sadistic. Two relatively young brothers rule the vast empire, with Fred Hechinger (Thelma) as Emperor Caracalla and Joseph Quinn (Stranger Things) as Emperor Geta. Scott says they threaten Lucilla’s wellbeing as a means of controlling Acacius. “They’re using her as a little bit of leverage if they have to,” the filmmaker says. “Caracalla and Geta are twins and are definitely damaged goods from birth.” Their leadership is a harbinger of the end of centuries of Roman dominance in the ancient world, and Scott says they were a kind of reversal of the legend of two brothers raised by a wolf mother, who were said to be founders of Rome: “This moment is wobbling along on all the brutality, cruelty, and wastefulness, and the two princes, of course, pay no attention. In a funny kind of way, they’re almost a replay of Romulus and Remus.”
The rage Lucius feels toward all of them is channeled into his battles with Acacius. “It’s brutal, man. I call him Brick Wall Paul,” Pascal says. “He got so strong. I would rather be thrown from a building than have to fight him again. To go up against somebody that fit and that talented and that much younger…. Outside of Ridley being a total genius, Paul is a big reason as to why I would put my poor body through that experience.”