Paul Mescal couldn’t shake the nerves that were getting into him Gladiator II.
During a Q&A after a special screening of the film in Los Angeles on Friday (October 18), the 28-year-old Irish actor revealed that he felt a little anxious on his first day of filming alongside Pedro Pascal – but director Ridley Scott made sure to get him back on track. time.
“The first day on set it was me and Pedro, and we were deliberately kept in tents, kind of outside the city walls,” Mescal recalled. “We were sitting in the tents and I was smoking a cigarette, and we were kind of marching around the place and Ridley comes in with a cigar.”
“And I was absolutely crap——. And he looked at me and said: ‘Are you nervous?’ And I… I didn’t know what the appropriate answer was. So I said, ‘Ah,'” he continued, before mimicking Scott, 86, patting him on the back. “He said, ‘Bang, your nerves aren’t fucking good on me.’ So [he] marching us.”
Paul Mescal as Lucius in ‘Gladiator II’.
Aidan Monaghan/Paramount Pictures
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Mescal was joined at the event by actors Denzel Washington, Connie Nielsen and Fred Hechinger, where they discussed making the film, which follows Scott’s Oscar-winning 2000 epic starring Russell Crowe as Lucius Verus. Mescal portrays the vengeful son of Crowe’s character Maximus, who is also an arena fighter in the film.
While it is All of us strangers star may have had nerves on set, Scott previously told Deadline in an interview that he knew there was something about Mescal that captivated him after watching it in the 2020s normal people, and invited him to a personal meeting to discuss the role shortly thereafter.
“I’m always looking for someone, something new and fresh. I mean, freshness is terribly important,” Scott said. “So they don’t carry… baggage is a terrible word for what they’ve done before, because it’s a great thing, but you remember he’s done this character before.”
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As for Mescal, he said The Hollywood Reporter he was “proud” to land the role shortly after news of his selection in 2023 broke, although he admitted at the time that it was a “daunting feat”.
“It’s something I’m nervous about, but something I feel I can do,” he added at the time.
Gladiator IIwritten by David Scarpa (Napoleon, the 2023 historical epic also directed by Scott), starring Pascal, Joseph Quinn and May Calamawy. Repeating his own Gladiator starring Nielsen as Lucilla, the mother of Mescal’s character, and Derek Jacobi as the Roman senator Gracchus.
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Paramount Pictures was the first to release the footage Gladiator II at CinemaCon in April. About the choice to shoot a sequel, Scott told Deadline in November 2023 that while the original Gladiator it was “completely satisfying, creatively complete… these cycles have been going on and on and on, repeating themselves globally for the last 20 years. It started to be spelled out as an obvious thing and that’s how it developed.”
Gladiator II in cinemas on 22.11.
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Source: HIS Education