Paul Mescal has revealed that he had an argument with Ridley Scott on the set of Gladiator II because the director wouldn’t let him perform his own stunt.
The actor stars as Lucius in the new film, which is released in UK cinemas on Friday (November 15), alongside Pedro Pascal, Denzel Washington, Connie Nielsen, Derek Jacobi and Joseph Quinn.
The Normal People and All Of Us Strangers star was eager to perform as many of his own stunts as he could, and in the case of one particular scene, that resulted in him having a moment of confrontation with his director.
Towards the end of the film, Lucius mounts a horse in pursuit of Washington’s Macrinus, and as Mescal recently told Variety, Scott tried to stop him from climbing onto the horse himself.
“Two weeks before the scene, Ridley says, ‘You’re not fucking doing it,’ and I was like, ‘What the fuck?,’ and we had this argument,” Mescal said.
Scott was in fact acting on advice he had picked up from his 1977 debut film The Duellists, when he allowed leading man Keith Carradine to ride a horse on set on the final day of shooting. The actor broke his leg and cost the production a fortune in insurance payouts.
“I was pestering him constantly,” Mescal added. “And then the day before, he goes, ‘OK, you can do the stunt, but if you come off, it’s two Bentleys.’ No Bentleys were required, thank fuck.”
Reviewing Gladiator II, NME‘s Alex Flood awarded the movie three stars and said: “If you loved Gladiator, it’s odds-on you’ll enjoy this too. It’s got all of the same exciting bits – swordfighting, rousing speeches, nasty poshos getting what they deserve.
“The problem is that’s all it gives you. You want to feel like you’re watching Maximus lift off his helmet and deliver that iconic monologue for the first time again. You want the thrill of a core memory being unlocked. You want to know you’ll be quoting Mescal’s lines to your mates in the pub for the next 10 years. Gladiator 2, piously respectful as it is, can only offer a faded memory of that experience. There was a dream that was Rome – and this is kind of it.”
The film’s concurrent release with Wicked has prompted some to dub the phenomenon Glicked, in reference to last year’s Barbenheimer.
“I don’t wanna jinx anything,” Mescal has said about Glicked. “How amazing would that be for this industry? I think that was such a massive moment for the industry last year and if we can replicate anything next to near that, it could be huge.”
Wicked stars Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande also agreed that it should be dubbed Glicked with the former commenting: “Glicked is what it is and that is what we should be doing.”
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