THINK THE ORIGINAL WAS WILD? YOU AIN’T SEEN NOTHIN’ YET, SAYS RIDLEY SCOTT, BACK IN THE COLOSSEUM FOR Gladiator II. AS HE AND THE CAST TELL US, THE LONG-AWAITED SEQUEL TAKES NO PRISONERS. READY TO BE ENTERTAINED?

WORDS HAYLEY CAMPBELL

Fight! Fight! Fight! Lucius (Paul Mescal) tears into Marcus Acacius (Pedro Pascal);

Baboons. That’s how you make a sequel to one of the most legendary films of all time: stick some baboons in it.

And a rhino charging into the Colosseum with a man standing on its back. And why not flood the place, fill it with naval ships, then let loose some ravenous sharks? It’s the Colosseum and this is Ancient Rome and we are here to be entertained. We want blood and betrayal, death and glory. Which is why Ridley Scott transformed 12 small stuntmen into vicious baboons.

“They were mean, muscular, real tough guys. And I put them on short stilts under their armpits so they could crawl on all fours and attack in the arena,” Scott tells Empire, balling his fists and puffing out his arms like a menacing primate. “And just for fun, I drew monkey faces on them,” he grins of the stuntmen, who would later become full baboons via CGI. This is what we’ve been waiting for. “It’s full-bore, brutal action.”

It’s been 24 years since we were first thrown into the arena with Gladiator, a film made in a time when producing a sword-andsandals epic was regarded as an experiment in courting disaster. But Michael Mann believed in it. It was Mann who introduced Scott to the actor who would go on to win an Academy Award for starring in it. Russell Crowe took his first meeting with Scott while still looking like the middle-aged tobacco-industry whistleblower he played in Mann’s film The Insider, far from the greased warrior that would define his career: Maximus Decimus Meridius, a Roman general reduced to slavery who became a gladiator and won the hearts of the crowd. He was also father to a murdered son, husband to a murdered wife —you know the line —and wanted vengeance, in this life or the next.

Gladiator went on to become the second-highest-grossing film of 2000 (pipped at the post by Mission: Impossible 2), won five Academy Awards including Best Picture, and was nominated for an additional seven. It is a film that remains so loved that Crowe was named Rome’s honorary ambassador in the world in 2022. What we’re saying is: trying to top it would be insane. But Ridley Scott is brave enough to do it.

The question is, how do you make a sequel to a film where everyone is dead?

I don’t think normal,” Scott explains, eyeballing us through the Zoom screen. He’s explaining where the first idea came from. It started in, of all places, Iceland. When he visited the country a few years after Gladiator came out, all he could see was dead people. “Iceland was very strange because there was no time. It was a winter’s day, which means at about noon it was nearly dark, and honestly —it felt like purgatory. The sea was iron-grey. The sky was iron-grey. The beach was black pebble, and that all stuck in my mind.”